Witnessed: Fade to Black - The Arsonist Next Door | 1: You Build We Burn

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

When Lee Benson’s nearly complete dream home burns to the ground, he thinks it must have been an accident. But then, a disturbing message is left at the scene. Are eco-terrorists behind this terrifying act? 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

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Or visit getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. The Binge, feed your true crime obsession. The Binge. Novel. novel. I just love the beauty of the desert. All the changing seasons, coyotes, pavelina,

bobcats, lots of rattlesnakes in the summertime. Phoenix, Arizona, the year 2000. Lee Benson is a local businessman. He's building his dream house. It's enormous. A custom designed mansion close to the Phoenix Mountains Preserve. An area of wilderness set aside for conservation.

This bumpy brown patch of desert is being transformed. The walls are up, the roof is on, all the wiring is in. Every day coming to the construction site and watching this thing go up, it was so much fun. Everything is going according to plan. All of a sudden the lights kicked on the station. Waking up from a sound sleep, you've got an adrenal rush, your heart starts pounding, you're breathing fast. It's 1138 on a Sunday night in April.

Battalion Chief Brian Parks leaps out of his bunk at a Phoenix Fire Station. Get dressed quick, get out to the truck. Pulling out of the station and heading south, you could see a glow in the sky. The glow is getting brighter and brighter, like a red dawn breaking over the mountains. But sunrise is still six hours away. What Brian's team is heading towards

is something much more dangerous. The flames were licking up probably 40, 50 feet in the air in the area the mountain preserves. A huge plume of smoke billows from the base of Piestua Peak. Undisturbed desert is where it was. You get something in there, you're gonna have a brush fire. The fire truck careens through a winding neighborhood onto a narrow dirt road before coming to a dead end. Beyond is nothing but desert,

a rugged valley covered in cactus and creosote bush. Very limited access, very, very dark, but you can see the glow the whole time and you're just trying to get back there to get to work. Lee Benson's mansion, on the verge of completion, is engulfed in flames. The whole structure's ignited and burning at this point. Brian has to make a decision on whether to send his people inside the building.

Rolling the window down, you could actually feel the heat. Because this is a construction site, Brian is hopeful there's no one inside to rescue. But even if there was, there's no way he can order his team into a fire like this. The wall could collapse, and you don't want to be in the area where the wall falls on you or some of our equipment. He tells his firefighters to stay back

and try and contain the blaze from the outside. The air is filled with the smell of wood smoke. Like a big lumberyard fire basically. You're going to hear crackling, you're going to hear crashes and stuff like that. You can actually hear the wind moving too because fire needs oxygen to burn. A strange howling sound pierces the air as if the fire itself were alive. Out in an open environment it's going to consume as much oxygen as it can, and it's going to grow fast. As the flames leap into the sky, fiery embers rain down

over neighboring houses, igniting small brush fires in the surrounding desert. If this fragile landscape burns, it will take decades to recover. At 5 30 a.m. the following morning, the owner, Lee Benson, is woken up by a phone call. What? I've got all this time and money and effort to this point. Like like what the heck happened? When he arrives at the scene, the road is lined with trucks, their lights flashing red and white. It was so hot that the concrete was sort of chipped up and coming apart.

Neighbors crowd around, craning their necks for a view of the destruction. When the fire was over, everything was burned. There was nothing left that wasn't burned in that house. The fire investigation team arrives to assess the damage. They're looking for clues to how it began, the point of origin. There's nothing natural that could have started that fire other than somebody else doing it.

In other words, arson. But Lee Benson, he's not so sure. It's probably just some kids smoking cigarettes, dropped a match. I just assumed that it was an accident. Sure, as someone who used to sneak into construction sites to smoke blunts with my friends when I was 16, I appreciate this theory. But then, a few weeks later, My builder put up a sign for his company and somebody wrote on it,

You build, we burn again. You build, we burn again. The word burn is underlined. And the message is signed with a mysterious acronym, CSP. Okay, this was intentional. Who is CSP? And why are they targeting Lee? Could there be somebody that, you know, has an issue with me?

I just needed answers. It's going to be a long time before Lee gets those answers, because CSP is far from done. There are dark times ahead for this quiet suburban neighborhood. You never want to think your next door neighbor is the serial killer, but he lives next to somebody. This is just the beginning of the most notorious arson spree Phoenix has ever seen. Is he just going to quit?

We going to catch him or somebody going to die? He was like the road runner zipping around the Arizona desert. My heart's starting to race now. Is this him? This is him. I know this is him. This has gotta be him. CSP's crimes will ignite a firestorm of media attention.

He thought he was so smart that he could taunt us by manipulating the media. And divide the communities of Phoenix. Some people were rooting for this guy, like a folk hero. We were terrified. Everybody was. From Sony Music Entertainment and Novel, I'm Sam Anderson. This is The Arsonist Next Door. Episode 1. You build, we burn. I've come to the sweltering city of Phoenix to investigate this story that began a quarter century ago with that first fire at Lee Benson's place.

Why? Because it's a story about going to the extreme, about the crazy things that seemingly ordinary people do under the right circumstances. And I want to understand what it takes to make someone go there, to send them over the edge. Personally, I'm already there. This heat is driving me absolutely insane. My producer, Leona and I have perfected a mad dash from the air-conditioned apartment to our air-conditioned car, a bright red Mini Cooper.

But the Mini takes a while to cool down. We're parked on a suburban street in North Phoenix, an area called Heritage Heights. It's just around the corner from Lee Benson's house, the scene of the crime, where it all began. I'm actually feeling kind of paranoid. You know when you're in a picture-perfect neighborhood and get that feeling like you're not supposed to be there? That's exactly the sort of place we're in right now.

It's an affluent suburb where dozens of cul-de-sacs wind around each other. I'm seeing Spanish style houses painted in desert colors. Some with lawns neatly trimmed and well watered, despite the heat, which makes no sense for the desert. We exit the car and start knocking on doors. Hello, my name is Sam Anderson. I'm a journalist. We're actually making a podcast.

We want to understand what kind of place this is and what happened 25 years ago when that first house went up in flames. This is the perfect place to live in Phoenix, Arizona. Absolutely the perfect place. Nestled between freeway 51 to the north and a panoramic view of the Phoenix Mountains Preserve to the south, this area is filled with wildlife.

Little teeny tiny gecko. New baby. And with an active homeowners association, everyone seems to have a pretty good idea of what everyone else is doing around here. I've had keys to every house in our cul-de-sac. You're looking out for the kids, picking them up at school if somebody needs help.

These folks aren't afraid to spill the tea about what their neighbors are up to. If you just wouldn't have had a noisy Doberman, nobody would have cared. From what I can tell, not a lot of bad stuff happens here. We just had our first squatter. Teenagers like to climb the fence and swim in the pool. The most shocking thing that ever happened in this neighborhood was that fateful day

in April 2000, when the residents of Heritage Heights woke to the sound of sirens to find Lee Benson's soon-to-be mansion burned to the ground. We didn't have fires like that. A lot of us gathered and went down there with our bikes. I mean, it was a big fire. It was scary as hell. I remember one time running by there with Mark, and we just stopped and looked at the house and how it had burned down and there was just nothing there. This is Warren Jerams. At the time of the fire, Warren also lived nearby.

An accountant in his 40s, Warren was tall, wiry, and physically fit, built like an antelope. He lived with a wife and two young daughters. Before the fire, he'd frequently jog through the preserves with his running buddy Mark, passing Lee Benson's construction site along the way. It's just a rocky mountain trail that weaves and twists and turns and goes ups and down, and we ran by that one regularly. Warren and Mark watched as Lee's house sprouted up and out over the desert landscape, all 10,000 square feet of it, complete with a four-car garage and

even a martial arts studio. It was much bigger than anything else in the neighborhood, and it was encroaching on the desert. At the time, urban sprawl was a pretty big issue in Phoenix. Phoenix is just a large growing city that was eating up the deserts. The particular preserve that borders Heritage Heights is one of many scattered across the city, like desert islands emerging from a sea of residential housing.

If you live next to one, it's like having a little bit of nature right on your doorstep. So Lee Benson's construction plans ruffled a few feathers. The locals are protective of these places, but was it really so out of place that someone would try to burn it down? It's my property and I get to do whatever I want with it. Lee was not going to be influenced by the tension in the neighborhood. I'm on private property that I purchase, not bordering any part of the preserve. It's all BS.

What Lee is saying is true. The problem is, it's not always clear to locals where exactly the preserve ends and private land begins. It's easy to mistake a vacant desert lot right by the preserve as part of the preserve, when actually it's just private land that no one's gotten around to building on yet. Technicalities aside, what mattered to Lee Benson's new neighbors was that an enormous mansion was being built directly between their homes and their previously uninterrupted view of a beloved mountain landscape.

And Lee Benson himself, well, he didn't quite fit in with the neighborhood either. This community was mostly upper middle class, doctors, real estate agents, quiet professionals raising families. Lee was and still is a high powered CEO. He's middle aged with a buzz cut, bright blue eyes and a charming smile. He's a business owner, an author, a martial arts teacher,

and he even achieved that most glorious title we all aspire to, a podcaster. Hello and welcome to the Show Your Value podcast where we explore the art of value creation in three macro buckets. Point is, the man is successful and he's definitely perceived as a bit flashy. Back at the time of the fire, Lee was hard at work creating value. Right around 2000, I'm running my full-time Taekwondo martial arts school, and I'm operating three different aerospace-related businesses.

Not only was the guy rich, he was fit, too. I've done lots of marathons, ultramarathons, competed in three different Ironmans. I just love to exercise. Not only was he rich and fit, he played guitar in a hard rock band. That's Lee on guitar. The band was called Three Degrees West. Played over a thousand nights on stages, clubs, concerts, all of that. So music's going on, martial arts is going on, I've got my

aerospace companies going on. Life is full and amazing. His life was so full and amazing that when his custom dream home got torched, he refused to let it set him back. Sometimes bad things happen and just deal with it. What was your reaction? There's no way I'm going to let somebody like that win. No way. It's like, okay, this happened. What's the plan and where do we go from here?

The plan was this. Rebuild. win? No way. It's like, okay, this happened. What's the plan? And where do we go from here? The plan was this. Rebuild. Same as before. Put up a little security fencing, hire a security guard, but not a professional security guard, just someone he connected with through his Taekwondo studio. Just somebody to be on the property with a phone to call if there was any issues. The security guard would drive over to Lee Benson's after work to sit in his car and watch over the place all night. He'd do this after working all day at his day job. Can you imagine working a desk job all day

just to sleep in your car while anxiously waking up every couple hours to make sure a mansion's not burned down? Sounds exhausting. That's probably why on the morning of October 1st, six months after Lee's house burned down, the guy decides to leave a little bit early, around 5.15, about an hour before sunrise. He wasn't supposed to, but he did.

supposed to, but he did. By 534 a.m., Lee Benson's house is on fire again. Brian Parks and his firefighters rush to the scene. Coming in there a second time, you have a really weird feeling as why is this being burned twice? And again, Lee shows up to see his grand vision reduced to a smoldering wreck. I was angry.

I can't believe this. This is such a waste of resources. Standing before the burnt remains, Lee gazes across at the neighboring streets full of single-family houses in neat rows. I remember looking at the houses and thinking, whoever it is lives there or knows somebody there, because somebody has to be watching to know this guy left a few minutes early that day.

In the days after the second fire, another message is found at the scene of the crime, this time in the form of a letter. It contains a chilling message for Lee. Thou shalt not desecrate God's creation. Lee Benson, take your dream house out of the preserve. It's springtime here in LA, so my family decided to freshen up our bedding and linens with a little help from our friends at Quince. All Quince items are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands.

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Follow and listen to Train to Kill, the dog trainer, the heiress, and the bodyguard on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Lieutenant Rob Handy is sitting in his office at the Phoenix Police Department headquarters. He's a big, serious-looking guy with a buzz cut. He's only in his early 30s, but he already has a reputation for being intense and pretty competitive when it comes to catching bad guys.

In his hand is the note left behind at the scene of the second fire, proof that Lee Benson's new home has been deliberately burnt down again. It says, warning across the top, that looks like it's been almost stenciled with two exclamation points. The fire department can't handle something like this alone, so they've called in the police. And Rob is tasked with leading the investigation.

But so far, he only has one lead, the piece of paper in his hand. Whoever wrote the letter has taken steps to conceal their identity. wrote the letter has taken steps to conceal their identity. Underneath it is typed from a computer and printed, but then the top looks like it's more scrawled. The letter goes straight into the ominous, thou shalt not desecrate God's creation line. And then it has Revelations 14, 10, and then Proverbs 17, 19. The two biblical passages it refers to

are kind of on the scarier side. Quote, they too will drink the wine of God's fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. And then it says we are not done. Lee Benson, take your dream house out of the preserve. Security will be defeated again. We've been trained well. Thanks.

At least this fire and brimstone arsonist is polite. Rob's eyes are drawn to the wheat. Is there a group behind this attack? And what's up with the signature? CSP again. With periods between it, as if it were an acronym. CSP is not an acronym Rob or his team have heard of before. The first thing that came to mind

was was this an environmental group. An environmental group with a sprinkling of religious extremism. So obviously we were looking like crazy and this is early on with the internet too. It's not like it is today, right? I mean, we were just not able to find anything. We thought this might be bogus.

They might be trying to throw us off. Why would they identify themselves so easily, or is this a group that's trying to establish themselves and this is their first foray into criminal activity? Do you remember what it felt like reading that note? Yeah, now he's messing with us. He? Not they? Honestly, our consideration initially was of somebody who hikes the trail every day. I mean, that's kind of what our thinking was to begin with. A pissed-off neighbor. Rob's got a hunch that their perp is a lone actor. Someone who lives nearby.

Someone who just does not like Lee Benson and his gaudy mansion. Probably a man, Rob thinks. After all, the vast majority of arsonists are men. And Lee, he thinks the same thing. To him, this feels personal. I was getting pressure from neighbors to donate the land to the preserve, and people made me out to be like the devil. It was crazy.

But as you've gathered already, Lee isn't the type to give up. For sure, I'm going to build again. Only by this point, he'm going to build again. Only by this point, he's got a new problem. Nobody would insure me. Lee can't rebuild until CSP is caught. So then my efforts just focused on how do I help find this individual so I can start building it again. But then, news reaches Lee Benson that changes everything. For the whole neighborhood. But then, news reaches Lee Benson that changes everything.

For the whole neighborhood. You know, it was super unfortunate and a little bit relieving for me personally when another home was burned down. A third fire. And this one didn't target Lee Benson. It was just a couple miles away, along the preserved border. Another new home under construction. This one was owned

by a family with young kids. And another house fire overnight may be the work of a serial arsonist. CSP strikes again. A fourth fire. This one was near Warren's place, the guy who would go running in the preserves. It was within a mile or so where I lived on the Gal Mountains. The neighborhood is buzzing with speculation. We couldn't really figure out what the cause of it was. By now, the pattern is crystal clear. All the half-built homes that have been burned are big and fancy

and situated along the edge of the mountains preserve. And it's not long before the letters, with all their religious fury, are leaked to the press. A frightening narrative begins to take shape in the local media. There's some radical, God-fearing environmentalists on the loose, and they're exacting revenge on anyone who dares to build too close to the preserve. A new letter appears, this time mailed directly to journalists,

who forward it to the police. The letter says, quote, We enjoy watching the surveillance activity. No trap works unless you walk into it. Don't bet on it. And there, in the signature of that letter, is the answer to a question Lieutenant Rob Handy has been asking for months. Coalition to Save the Preserves.

CSP stands for Coalition to Save the Preserves. There's an eco-terrorist group running around Phoenix burning homes. An environmental terrorist. Eco-terror campaign of arson. We may have an eco-terrorist on our hands. It's probably been a while since you heard the phrase eco-terrorism. It doesn't happen very often these days. But there was a time, not too long ago, in the late 1990s, when this was

a big deal. At this particular moment in history, before 9-11, one of the biggest threats the feds were worried about wasn't terrorists flying airplanes into buildings, but left-wing environmentalists, and one group in particular, the Earth Liberation Front, or ELF. Members of the Earth Liberation Front say it's okay to destroy property in an effort to save the environment. The ELF is absolutely an environmental fundamentalist group. The group described by the FBI as America's most serious domestic terrorist threat. If you're somebody else who's destroying the natural environment,

you may be considered the next target of the ELF or a group life. By December of 2000, local journalists are really starting to run with the eco-terror story. Because you know what the ELF's favorite tactic was? The first time since flames were spotted on Vale Mountain, investigators Thursday were willing to say the fires were caused by the criminal act of arson. One of the group's most famous acts of protest occurred just a few years earlier, in 1998. Vale residents awoke to shocking news Monday. Fire atop Vale Mountain had caused $12 million in damages.

At the time, Vale was expanding its ski resort, encroaching on hundreds of acres of pristine wilderness that was home to endangered wildcats. The attack became the costliest act of so-called eco-terrorism in U.S. history. And before long, ELF starts burning things down all over the country, always following an ideology of protecting the environment through property destruction, without the loss of human life. And when the ELF burned down a building, they became known for leaving a particular catchphrase behind. The words, you build, we burn.

It's the exact same phrase included on the letters from CSP in Phoenix. Looking at all these similarities, it seems a pretty good bet to journalists and investigators that the ELF is somehow involved in the Phoenix fires. The only problem is the ELF signs their letters ELF, not CSP. Could this be a splinter group? Lieutenant Rob Handy is painfully aware of all this speculation, but despite the intrigue of a national activist cell

emerging in Phoenix, he still has a hunch that the culprit might just be a local with a grudge against new houses. An extreme act of NIMBYism. Somebody's just trying to throw us off by this name and there is no group. Which theory is right? Well, there's not much hard proof either way. The funny thing about fire is that it tends to destroy the evidence. So for now, Rob focuses on canvassing the neighborhood. We're looking for leads, we're asking for help,

our investigators were going door to door. So far, whoever's behind these fires has managed to get in and out without being seen. Always one step ahead of us initially. It just made you mad. It makes you more angry. Rob has spent hours just staring at the map of the fires, searching for a pattern. Where will CSP strike next? It's a chase, you know, you're chasing them.

They're trying to get away, you're trying to catch them. And they're trying to not leave clues and we're trying to find clues. It's like trying to solve a hard puzzle. Is it frustrating knowing that one guy or group of people is outsmarting like a whole police department? Oh, for sure. For sure. You know, how's this going to stop?

Is he just going to quit? We're going to catch him or somebody going to stop? Is he just going to quit? We going to catch him or is somebody going to die? The community is restless. It's December, around nine months since the first fire at Lee Benson's. The people living around the preserve are frustrated with the cops who haven't made a single arrest and seem totally incapable of protecting them from future attacks. There was a risk the entire time of it spreading to neighbors' homes or burning an entire neighborhood.

I felt like it was my responsibility. Lieutenant Rob decides to call a community meeting. I asked for the meeting and asked if we could host it at Tim's house. Tim and his wife Peggy are victims of the fourth fire. Their $1.5 million home was nearly complete when it became a target of CSP. A room upstairs burned, but the rest of the house was saved by the quick work of firefighters.

After the fire, Tim and Peggy installed barbed wire fencing, motion sensors, and a lighting system. They started warning hikers out in the preserve to be on the lookout for strange behavior. Lieutenant Rob decides to hold a community meeting at Tim and Peggy's place, where the acrid smell of smoke still lingers.

It was in his front living room, and that was the first big public interaction we had. It's Saturday morning. About a dozen community members gather around the empty room to learn whatever they can from the police. Everyone is waiting for Rob to speak. Starting off like introducing ourselves, giving out our information,

phone numbers, asking for information, sharing what limited information we could share and what we were doing and how important it was to us as a police department, hear their ideas or their concerns and do what we could to address those. Some neighbors complain about slow response times from investigators. Others say not enough resources are being devoted to the case. One neighbor spells it all out. We're all threatened. It's not just neighbors building homes.

Rob tries to reassure everyone that the case is a top priority. He's trying his best, but it's not going well. They're upset at a lot of things. This neighborhood sits up against the preserves. All these people are fearful. What's next? Is somebody going to get hurt? Is somebody else's house going to burn?

Whose house? Is it my house? Is it your house? I imagine the neighbors exchanging paranoid glances. Any one of them could be an arsonist. Lieutenant Rob can't share everything his team is doing in front of this crowd of neighbors. We didn't know who was in the audience.

And I mean, that proved out. A blonde-haired woman lingers in the back of the crowd. She's not one of the neighbors. Afterwards she came up and introduced herself. She said, hey, I'm Terry from the FBI. I was probably in a suit, so that probably stood out because you know you're a typical FBI agent. This is Terry Kearns, at the time an FBI special agent. She's young and new to Phoenix. Terry was a nurse before the FBI recruited her. She's confident, with a reassuring presence, but not to rob.

Honestly, I was offended she was there and didn't introduce herself to begin with. I didn't know who all was going to be there. I didn't know what was going on. I really just wanted to see what was being done. Anyone who's ever watched a cop movie knows they hate it when another agency moves in on their turf. We felt it was a neighborhood problem. We didn't feel like it was a federal government problem

and I'd worked with the FBI before and this isn't their forte. Houses have been burning for nine months by this point and the Phoenix PD has basically nothing to show for it. So I'm not sure it's Rob's forte either. But Rob tells Terry he doesn't want to form a task force with the FBI. Phoenix PD can handle it on their own. But it's not long before things start spinning out of Rob's control. The phone rang about nine o'clock at night, and the cousin of one of my cousins lived around the corner from here, and she said, Amy, I hate to be an alarmist, but I think

your house is on fire. 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. I was in a women's organization and it was a luncheon and I believe it was at the Phoenix Country Club. It's a mild and perfect day in December.

Amy Gitler and her friends gaze out at the lush green golf course, which I'm sure consumes an absolutely obscene amount of water. But this is of no concern to the leading ladies of Phoenix, who I like to picture snacking on tiny triangle-shaped sandwiches served on a silver platter. Amy is a seasoned lawyer who once argued a case in front of the Supreme Court.

She has short-cropped red hair and a serious but friendly personality. During the luncheon, one of her friends approaches, looking concerned. She came up and she said, Amy, Amy, what about this arsonist who's burning down houses? Amy and her husband are in the middle of building their new home. It's on a plot of land that happens to be located right on the edge of the Phoenix Mountains Preserve. But Amy tells her friend she isn't so concerned about these arson attacks.

Don't be silly, Karen. That's on the other side of the preserve. The fires are happening on the other side of the mountain from where Amy's new house is being built. And literally that night is the night that we got the phone call. Back at home around 9 p.m., Amy has just put her two kids to bed when the landline rings. It's a relative who lives nearby. They can see the red glow of a fire in the direction of Amy's new place. She rushes over. I see crowds of people in front and they wouldn't let anybody through.

I see huge flames billowing out and it's carved off and nobody's allowed up and I said that's my house I want up and so they let us up. When Amy gets to the front of the crowd she realizes those huge flames aren't from her own property but the one next door. The lot next to us was fully framed and they had not been building for about a year. That house was like Tinder. I mean, you lit a match to that and that went down in about 15 minutes. The neighbor's place is reduced to ash. Amy's house was set on fire too, but firefighters were able to put it out before

the fire really got going. Luckily, only the bathroom is affected. But Amy is still shaken by what happened. Amy's house was set on fire too, but firefighters were able to put it out before the fire really got going. Luckily, only the bathroom is affected. But Amy is still shaken by what happened. I was barely functioning the next day. And I remember I had such a horrible headache, I took two codeine. I just remembered a sense of chaos. Law enforcement thought that likely he would return to our place. After all, CSP burned Lee Benson's house twice, and Amy's place was saved and shown on the

news. So the cops set up camp inside Amy's construction site. In order to catch him if he came back. And keep in mind there's no roof, it's just framed. Lieutenant Rob Handy and his team aren't just camping in this site. They're camping all over the place. Undercover cops are posted up in unmarked cars throughout the neighborhood, trying their best to not look like cops.

But Rob's team is spread pretty thin. They don't have unlimited resources, and there's a huge area to cover. Meanwhile, someone or a group of people is sneaking around, somehow getting past you guys to light these houses on fire. Or we weren't in the right area, right? The preserve is enormous.

But Rob is hopeful, because his team has finally uncovered a suspect. They had some hardcore environmental leanings and had some light criminal history. This guy had a sign in his window protesting development. Someone had called into the police to report him as suspicious. And not only that... He lived up against a preserve in an old house and was kind of a hermit. They'd been there for a long time. Development had gone on around him.

Keep in mind, the Sonoran Desert is being rapidly gobbled up by developers at this time. A report in the Arizona Republic uses the phrase, an acre an hour, to describe how fast the city of Phoenix is expanding into the surrounding desert. We spent a lot of time surveilling him, watching him, doing everything we could. how fast the city of Phoenix is expanding into the surrounding desert. We spent a lot of time surveilling him, watching him, doing everything we could. We did search warrants, we looked at his trash, we did all kinds of stuff.

For the first time since this case began, Rob is starting to feel hopeful that he's onto something. But then... The entire sky over the mountain was glowing. Another house goes up in flames. People were upset, scared, fearful. Things are about to get a lot more complicated. I'm glad you guys are doing this story.

This is a story about fire and betrayal with world-changing consequences. I believe it really had some consequences on world events. Think about every aspect of your life that that day changed. I mean, my God, that's real terrorism. That's coming up on The Arsonist Next Door. Don't want to wait for that next episode? You don't have to. Unlock all episodes of The Arsonist Next Door ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge

Podcasts channel. Search for The Binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page. Not on Apple? Head to GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. As a subscriber, you'll get Binge access to new stories on the first of every month. Check out the Binge channel page on Apple Podcasts, or getthebinge.com to learn more. [♪ Music Playing! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music! Binge Music 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 Zayanna 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 Danja 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, Isaac Fisher, Kevin Lee Carras, Jess Swinburne, Sunny Mar, Carly Frankel, and the team at WME. You