The American Lawyer

June, 1996

An Excerpt from Triple Jeopardy; A New Book by
Roger Parloff, Am. Lawyer, June 1996, at 97

PEOPLE USED TO CITE THE JOHN KNAPP CASE AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF WHY WE NEED A DEATH PENALTY.

They don't anymore.

In Triple Jeopardy, to be published in July by The American Lawyer/Little, Brown and Company, American Lawyer senior writer Roger Parloff tells Knapp's remarkable 19-year saga.

In November 1974 Knapp was convicted of having burned his two toddler daughters to death by setting a fire in their bedroom one year earlier. In January 1975, he was sentenced to death for that unspeakable crime.

But, as Parloff shows in this minute-by-minute case study, Knapp, an indigent, uneducated man, appears actually to have been a victim of the legal system. Gradually, defense lawyers discovered that the jury verdict convicting Knapp was the product of every form of distortion and mistake to which a trial can be subject -- sly lawyering, mistaken memory, faulty science, withheld and destroyed evidence, and, perhaps, perjury. For almost two decades defense lawyers fought to free Knapp as the legal obstacles to doing so grew progressively more impregnable.

Readers of this magazine may be familiar with portions of Knapp's story. Editor in chief Steven Brill first wrote about it in December 1983, when Knapp was then facing his fifth warrant of execution -- having at that point already once come within 48 hours of the gas chamber ["Innocent Man on Death Row"]. Years later, Parloff wrote about then-breaking developments ["They Still Want to Kill Him," July/August 1991; "Whitewash," June 1994].

Parloff, who won a National Magazine Award in 1993 for a controversial essay defending the jury acquittals of the police officers in the first Rodney King beating case ["Maybe The Jury Was Right," July/August 1992], was formerly an assistant district attorney and a criminal defense lawyer in Manhattan. Triple Jeopardy may prove as controversial as his King essay, though it may anger a different political group. It is a riveting look at America's justice system at its best -- and worst.

This month we present the first chapter, which describes the fire exactly as neighbors, firemen, and investigators witnessed it. Chapters 2 and 3 will follow next month.

THE FIRE

Witnesses said they first say smoke sometime between 8 and 8:15 on Friday morning, November 16, 1973.

It was coming from a tract house in East Mesa, Arizona. John Henry Knapp, 27, lived there, along with his wife Linda, 22, and their two little girls, Linda Louise, 3 1/2, and Iona Marie, 2 1/2. The older child was known as Little Linda, and the younger one they called Noni.

The Knapps' one-story, three-bedroom home -- just 1,040 square feet in all -- sat in the desert about 25 miles east of Phoenix. It was part of a new, federally subsidized development a few miles east of Mesa, then a town of about 63,000.

No freeways yet stretched that far east from Phoenix, and the nearest road from Mesa turned to gravel a block before reaching the cross street that led to the development.

The house at 7435 East Capri had just been built in January. In April the Knapps had moved in. Like some of their neighbors, they did not yet have a grass lawn -- an expensive undertaking in the desert.

The sun had risen at exactly seven o'clock on November 16. Though the temperature had gotten up to 78 degrees the day before, it was a chilly 44 when the fire started.

A tall Mexican-American neighbor of Knapp's, Dave Contreras, was probably the first to get to the scene. He ran, half-dressed, the 50 yards or so to the Knapps', entering the house through a back door.

"When I entered, John Knapp was coming in the house with the garden hose," he later testified, "and he was by the hallway. There was quite a bit of smoke, and there was a full blaze in the hallway. That's when I asked him if there was anyone in there. He turned around and very sarcastically said, 'Who do you think? My daughters are in there, and they're burned to death.' At some point another neighbor, Jim Garrison, came in the house. We were all trying to pour water into the hallway and get to the bedroom, but there was no way.

The flames were over the hallway and the smoke was too great to even try." *

* Quotations in this chapter, which are drawn from court testimony have been edited for brevity, clarity, and to convert question-and-answer colloquy into a narrative.

Notes explaining the source of quotations and other actual assertions, which appear at the back of the book, have been omitted from this magazine excerpt.

Shirley Grenko had just finished breakfast when she looked out the window and noticed smoke pouring out of the Knapps' cooler. (Houses in the development were equipped with large, box-shaped evaporative coolers on their shingle roofs. Coolers, which are less expensive to operate than air conditioners, work well as long as the humidity is very low.) She shouted to her husband and son to bring a hose, and then ran over to the Knapps'. When she got there, Knapp was outside the burning bedroom window with a garden hose.

"He broke the window with the end of the hose -- the nozzle," Grenko later testified. "Well, he had to jump back because the flames shot out about four feet. There was just a blast of black smoke. Mr. Knapp tried to get the hose up to the fire, but the flames were shooting out. The heat was intense."

Three other neighbors also said they saw Knapp break out the window with the hose.

Jim Garrison, who lived across the street from the Knapps, remembered learning about the fire when a neighbor came hammering at his door at what the neighbor said was 8:10 A.M. When Garrison looked outside, John and Linda Knapp were standing "toward the end of the driveway off on the grass," as he remembered it. Linda was "frantic . . . upset, and screaming, 'My babies are in there,'" while John Knapp appeared "calm and collected." While at least one other witness remembered Linda as "hysterical," at least six others said she showed suspiciously little emotion.

Garrison ran in the front door of the Knapp house and tried to crawl through the living room toward the fire on his belly, but there was too much smoke and heat. He came back out and got a hose from his house. He hooked it up to the spigot in the back of the Knapp house, since someone had already attached a hose to the spigot in front. He brought his own hose around to the front and tried to pour water in the window of the burning bedroom.

Garrison remembered the fire engines arriving some time shortly after that.

About five minutes after John broke the window out, as Shirley Grenko remembered it, John noticed her standing there.

John did not seem upset, according to Grenko. He was wearing a blue shirt, blue pants, and white shoes, she said.

Most neighbors who saw Knapp that morning remembered him as having worn white shoes. Two neighbors, however, said he was carrying his shoes in his hands when they first saw him and put them on only later.

Days afterward, John and Linda would say that John had been wearing white socks at first and that after the firefighters put out the flames he returned to the house and got his shoes.

John asked Shirley Grenko if she would go across the street and console his wife, which she did. Linda, who was wearing a blue, flower-patterned terry-cloth robe, told Grenko she wanted to talk to her mother.

"We went over to a neighbor's house to use her phone," Grenko recalled. "After John broke the window, it seemed like it took the fire trucks fifteen to twenty minutes to come. It seemed like a long time."

AT 8:28 A.M. THE FIREFIGHTERS AT Station 20 in Scottsdale got an alarm for a house fire, with children trapped inside, at 7435 East Capri. Eight firefighters set out for the fire in three trucks and a car.

Even before they left the station the firemen could see the thick, black smoke rising to the south less than two miles away.

Chief Geary Roberts's car and the attack truck arrived together at about 8:30. Heavy flames and smoke were rolling out the front middle bedroom window. Two half-dressed men were ineffectually pointing garden hoses at that window, which was already broken out.

A firefighter jumped from the attack truck and put on his air pack while his partner, a lieutenant, dragged a fire hose toward the front window.

The second truck pulled onto the vacant lot next door, and its men brought a second hose in through the back door.

-- Is there anyone in there? -- a fireman shouted to the two men with garden hoses. *

* Quotation marks are used only for words that were recorded by audiotape, videotape, stenographer, or the author's notes. All other conversations are marked with dashes. The essential content of such conversations is undisputed, unless otherwise noted, and is drawn from accounts of the conversations provided by participants or witnesses to them, either in their testimony, interviews with police or lawyers, or, in later chapters, in interviews with the author.

-- There's two little girls trapped inside, -- one screamed.

A tall, thin, awkward young man with black hair approached the firefighter.

-- My two daughters are in there, and they're dead, -- he said. -- Forget about the house.

John Knapp was fully dressed, according to the firemen, and not dirty or smoky.

Later, most neighbors remembered Knapp as having been very clean, with no smoke or soot on him. One neighbor, however, who said he saw Knapp at about the time the fire engines were arriving, remembered him being "all smoked over and dirty" and looking "like he had been fighting the fire." That neighbor, and one other, also remembered seeing Knapp wash his face at water spigots in front of other houses.

Two firefighters with air packs took up the line from the second truck and pulled it down the hall toward the flames that were pulsating from the open door leading to the children's bedroom. They attacked the fire from the inside while the lieutenant poured water in the window from the outside.

The fire kept flaring back, but after three or four minutes they knocked it down. Then they searched the rest of the house, looking for hot spots or survivors.

Although the whole house had suffered smoke damage, the fire had not spread to any other area except the hallway outside the bedroom.

In the living room the lieutenant found a large, unharmed tomcat. He picked him up and took him out of the house. Seeing Knapp, the lieutenant began to hand the cat to him.

-- Throw the damn cat in the garbage, Knapp told him. -- I don't want it. Go back in there and find my kids.

Another firefighter got a ladder and checked the attic for fire extension, looking through a scuttle hole in the carport.

-- They're not in the attic, damn it, -- Knapp told him.

When the children's room had cooled, Chief Roberts and a firefighter began removing the larger pieces of debris. A portion of the ceiling had come down, further obscuring the contents. But within a minute or two they found two charred objects with bones protruding from them.

"You couldn't really tell if they were human or animal," one fireman later wrote in his report. The smaller object, Iona, was found lying under the window on the north side of the room. Little Linda's body was found under the remains of a mattress near the west wall of the room.

Moments later John Knapp walked into the hallway.

-- Can I help you? -- asked Chief Roberts.

-- I'm the father, -- said Knapp, pushing past him and entering the bedroom.

Roberts pulled him back and then, not wanting him to see his children like this, said, They're not in here. Are you sure they're in here? --

-- I know they're in here, -- Knapp responded, -- and if you don't do something, I'll knock your damn head off.

Roberts asked a fireman to get a deputy sheriff to take Knapp out of the house.

While he waited for the deputy, Roberts asked Knapp how the fire started. Knapp told him he didn't know, but that the children had set several fires in the house and that they had once recently pulled the stuffing from one of the mattresses. Maybe they had somehow set one of the mattresses on fire, Knapp suggested.

At a fireman's request, neighbor Jim Garrison took Knapp across the street to Molly Cameron's house, where Shirley Grenko had also taken Linda.

Are you sure they're in the house? -- John asked Linda, when he got there. -- We can't find them anywhere. --

-- I know they're in there. Oh my God, don't tell me they burned so bad there is no trace of them.

The neighbor who recalled this conversation later said she had been shocked at how detached Linda seemed.

All the neighbors were, she said.

Two neighbors got in their cars and went searching for the children, in case they were off wandering. They were known to do that in the mornings.

Shirley Grenko also saw John at Molly Cameron's. "He went up to his wife and sat on the couch next to her and said something to the effect of, 'You might as well get it in your head. Your kids are dead,'" Grenko said.

By 8:55 two deputy sheriffs had arrived. They examined the girls' bodies. Iona was in a fetal or "praying position," as one of them saw it. Little Linda, on the other hand, had apparently "crawled under the bed to escape the fire," he wrote in his report.

The deputies asked Chief Roberts how the fire started. Chief Roberts told them, according to each deputy's notes, that it looked to him as if the fire started when a mattress caught fire, and that he saw no indications of arson, flammable liquids, or foul play. Roberts later denied ever making such statements.

The higher-ranking deputy decided there was no need to call any detectives. But he also wrote down that the father "appeared very calm and composed as he carried a cup of coffee around with him."

At various points that morning Knapp made remarks that his neighbors considered inappropriate. Molly Cameron remembered that when she urged a fireman to get into the house because the children were in there, John Knapp turned to her and said, -- You might as well forget it. They're among the dead.

Cameron also remembered him saying to someone else, -- If that don't kill them, I don't know what will.

Almost everyone found Knapp's demeanor odd.

"It's hard to explain exactly how John acted," Garrison later said. "He didn't act like really anything happened, like. Just like there was a lot of things he had to do, and he was hurrying here and there. He just acted very active."

As the smoke cleared, the firemen began to appreciate that the Knapp house was the filthiest they had ever seen. Two firemen, making assumptions that reflected the mores of the time and place, observed in their notebooks that no woman could have lived there for months. In the entire home, only two pieces of clothing were actually hanging in the closet -- two men's shirts. Everything else was piled or strewn at random on the floor or on any available piece of furniture.

Throughout the house there were toys, cardboard boxes, garbage, broken debris, open jars and cans of rotting food, dirty dishes, cat feces, newspapers, magazines, and dirty clothes. In the master bedroom, in the southeast corner of the house, there was a mattress and a broken box spring with a torn cover; mattress stuffing was scattered all about the room. In the far east bedroom, which had also not been involved in the fire, there were broken pieces of a crib and a small chest that had all its drawers pulled out and strewn about the room.

The kitchen counters were filled with dirty dishes and rotting food. Two firefighters almost vomited, they later wrote in their reports, when they opened the refrigerator. It contained only spoiled food and a pool of unidentifiable, molding pink liquid.

The living room, where the Knapps had apparently been sleeping on the folded-down sofa, was littered with delinquency notices from utility services and other creditors. The firemen determined that the gas in the house had, in fact, been shut off at the time of the fire, apparently due to nonpayment.

Aside from chaos, the salient feature of the Knapp home was flammable liquid. As the firemen entered the house through the front door, there was a red can of Coleman fuel sitting on a low homemade bookcase to the left and a second can of Coleman fuel sitting on the floor to the right. The one on the bookcase was standing open and had a funnel sitting in the spout. That can was about half full, the firemen found, while the one on the floor was full.

Yet another Coleman fuel can -- an empty one -- was lying outside the house in the carport, while an empty gasoline can lay in the mud of the lawn.

On top of the conventional kitchen stove was a two-burner, camping-style Coleman stove, and a few feet away on a kitchen counter there was a small container of charcoal lighter fluid. A Coleman lantern stood on the back of the toilet in the bathroom in the hallway, across from the fire-involved room.

The house also showed damage from several very small fires, apparently unrelated to the fatal fire. At the north end of the living room, between the sofa and a front window, there were four burn spots on the thick gold carpet, and in the hallway bathroom there was another series of burn spots on the carpet. The lower exterior of the toilet bowl had a large burn discoloration, as did the underside of the toilet seat.

Throughout the house there were implements to start fires. There were at least ten books of matches in the house, all but one of which were lying on the floor or on low items of furniture. One or two lighters also lay on the floor. Individual paper matches -- some struck, but most unstruck were strewn about. Inside the oven in the kitchen was a roaster pan filled with burned paper. There was more burned paper in an ashtray in the living room. When the firemen folded up the back of the sofa, turning it from a bed back into a couch, they found partially burned pages of magazines lying under it, some of them rolled like torches.

LINDA'S MOTHER, LOUISE RAMSEY (a pseudonym), was working at the Motorola factory in Tempe when a supervisor told her that her daughter had a problem with her little girls. Louise drove to the house and, when she saw the fire engines, was so unnerved that she ran over a neighbor's rose garden in her car.

Five neighbors later remembered that Linda was not crying and showed no emotion until her mother arrived.

Two remembered Louise and Linda having the following conversation:

-- Oh, my God! What have you done to these children now? -- Louise asked.

-- Both my children are dead. --

-- Both of them? --

-- Yes, both of them.

Linda then began to cry.

Linda's sobs seemed forced, according to one neighbor. Her emotion didn't look genuine, said another.

Linda's mother, Louise, later told a state investigator that Linda came running up to her and said, "Momma, my babies are dead." Louise had asked, "Are you sure it's both of them?" and Linda answered, "Yes, it's both of them, I'm sure."

A fire department photographer, officer-trainee Stephen Hermann, arrived at 9:35, and a sheriff's department photographer came about ten minutes later.

While they were taking pictures, John Knapp went to a neighbor's and telephoned the bishop of the Twelfth Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, who also ran a tire store in East Mesa. The bishop's wife, Carolyn Goodman, answered.

-- I want to talk to the bishop, -- he said.

-- Well, he isn't here right now. Can I take a message for him? --

-- I need to talk to the bishop. --

-- He's out of town, is there anything I can do? --

-- My children have just been burnt to death and my wife needs someone here with her.

-- Well, I'll be right there.

Goodman arrived at Knapp's house about 15 minutes later.
"I said, 'I'm sister Goodman,'" she later testified. "And John came at me like a bear, and he said, 'If the bishop would have paid the utility bill, the children wouldn't have been trying to light a fire to keep warm!'"

After photographs had been taken of the bodies in the debris, a deputy attached red tags to the remains of the girls' feet. He wrote on the back of one, "no suspicious surroundings," and on the other, "no foul play."

At 10:15 two firemen removed the bodies on stretchers and put them in an ambulance. A local television news crew captured the moment on videotape. Knapp, shown from the waist up, is wearing a blue polo-style pullover shirt. He appears somber and is looking down at the ground. A neighbor later remarked that this was the only moment Knapp showed grief. People later speculated that maybe he was playing for the camera.

Once the children's bodies were removed, firemen cleaned out the rest of the room. A large mound of undifferentiated fire debris was piled outside the window, and no written inventory of the contents of the fire-involved room was ever made.

While this was going on, Jim Garrison, the neighbor who had fought the fire, chatted with Chief Roberts. The children were probably better off now, Garrison commented, given the way the parents took care of them.

Garrison said they were locked out of the house nearly all day every day and that the neighbors probably fed them more than their parents did. Garrison also mentioned that Knapp had lost his job recently and that the family had had its utilities shut off. They were using a Coleman stove and lantern for cooking and lighting.

-- Was the house burglarized? -- fire inspector James McDaniel asked the firemen when he first set foot in the house at about 10:35. Because of the disarray, McDaniel assumed that the house had been ransacked by intruders.

McDaniel, 32, was the son of a fire chief. He had first started fighting fires with his father when he was 11.

He later testified that he had seen about 9,000 fires by the time he inspected the Knapp home, including about 1,000 flammable liquid fires. (For that estimate to be true, McDaniel would have to have seen about 427 fires a year from age 11 forward.)

While McDaniel began inspecting the house, the photographer Hermann discovered yet another Coleman fuel can, this one in the living room closet, which stood open. The can was covered up with about a foot and a half of newspapers and other debris. This can was empty.

As the firefighters continued clearing debris from the children's room, portions of the floor were becoming visible. McDaniel pulled a rubber squeegee across a section of wet, bare floor. As he did, he noticed an oily film on the water. The film smelled like Coleman fuel, he thought.

Several other firemen dipped their fingers in the film, smelled them, and agreed that it smelled like a flammable liquid. One of them then sifted through the pile of debris outside the window to see if any flammable liquid container had been in the room, but found none.

Once the oily film was discovered, the whole complexion of the investigation changed, according to officer trainee Hermann.

"Everybody out of the water," he later remembered thinking to himself.

Hermann radioed the assistant chief, who was already on his way back to headquarters in Scottsdale.

-- I think we've got something here, -- Hermann told him.

A few minutes later the assistant chief called the state fire marshal to report a possible arson.

McDANIEL SCOOPED UP A SAMple of the oily film with a jar and then placed in the same jar pieces of carpet and pad that were saturated with the same film. He sealed the jar and labeled it.

He then had the rest of the debris from the floor removed. The carpet had been consumed in a very erratic manner, he noticed. In a few places the fire had burned all the way through the carpet, pad, and vinyl floor tile down to the concrete, yet in other spots the carpet was intact. MeDaniel believed that the heavily charred areas were areas where flammable liquid had been poured.

When all the carpet and padding was removed, there were irregular char patterns on the floor, like large inkblots. McDaniel believed these were flammable liquid runs, showing where an accelerant had been poured.

He had the firefighters clean the floor with squeegees and dry it with rags from the Knapps' home before he took more samples. (A dispute later arose over how carefully the firefighters inspected these rags before using them. Were they clean? Could the rags have been soaked with anything?)

The firemen then took two "extract" samples of the floor using the solvent methylene chloride. A piece of gauze was soaked with the solvent, rubbed on the floor with a stainless steel spatula, and then placed in a jar and sealed. The solvent was supposed to soak up any residue of flammable liquid still present on the floor.

At one point, as the firemen worked, Knapp came back to the house and asked if he could get some personal items.

-- My wife's the world's worst housekeeper, Knapp said under his breath as the fireman escorted him to the master bedroom. -- She's mentally disturbed. I should have had her committed a long time ago.

Edward Beyer arrived at the scene at about 10:30 A.M., not long after the children's bodies had been driven away to the mortuary in ambulances.

Beyer had a strange job. He had radios in his car and home that were tuned to the emergency frequencies used by the fire department. Whenever he heard about a fire or some other calamity that might involve an insurance claim, he headed to the scene. He would find the victim of the tragedy and offer to act as his or her agent in dealing with the victims insurance company, taking 10 percent of anything the insurer paid. Beyer was called a public insurance adjuster and was licensed by the state to do what he did.

Upon arriving at 7435 East Capri, Beyer made his pitch to John Knapp, whom he later described as having been in a state of confusion. Beyer discovered that Knapp did not know what sort of insurance he had on the house or how much it was going to cover.

Since Linda's mother, Louise, was about to drive John and Linda to her home in Tempe, John invited Beyer to meet him there and talk further.

At some point -- it could have been either before or after Beyer's arrive -- Shirley Grenko invited the Knapps and Louise into her house and gave them coffee and cookies. Grenko later remembered John Knapp having remarked that "he guessed he'd still have to pay for his carpet. And I told him if he was making payments on it, maybe he had insurance on it, and to check into it."

Neighbor Jim Garrison later also remembered Knapp having mentioned the carpet to him.

"He seemed more concerned about the house and about the carpet that was not paid for than worrying about his children," according to Garrison.

Louise and Kenneth Ramsey (pseudonyms), Linda's mother and stepfather, lived in a small one-story house at 1708 South Hardy Drive in Tempe, about 15 miles west of the Knapp home in East Mesa. They lived there with their three teenage daughters -- Linda's half-sisters.

At the Ramseys', John and Linda signed a contract appointing public insurance adjuster Beyer as their agent.

Beyer then advised John to go with him to the insurance company.

Beyer drove Knapp to Kenneth Templeton's office in Tempe, arriving in the late morning. Knapp explained to Templeton, who had sold him the policy, that he'd had a fire in his home and that his daughters had burned to death.

Templeton was dumbfounded at Knapp's callousness in coming to the insurer so rapidly after such an event.

"The emotion and concern John Knapp showed," he later told a state investigator, "was no more than if his cat had burned to death."

Templeton looked up Knapp's policy. Knapp had dwelling insurance, which covered the house but not the furnishings. Templeton wasn't sure if it covered the wall-to-wall carpeting. Knapp would have to check with the claims adjuster, who worked at a different office to the north.

Beyer took Knapp back to the Ramseys'. Chief deputy state fire marshal David Dale arrived at the fire scene at 12:55 P.M. Dale, 42, was a tall, robust, angular, balding man. By his estimates, he had investigated about 500 fires, of which about 100 had involved flammable liquids.

As Dale examined the house he noticed that the smoke and heat damage to the rest of the house were minor, suggesting that the fire had not lasted very long.

Inside the children's bedroom, Dale saw from the charring of the baseboards that there had been significant floor-level burning. The charring was on all four baseboards, and the damage to all four Sheetrock walls and the ceiling had been about equal. Dale concluded that there had been no single, localized "point of origin" for the fire. Instead, a flammable liquid must have been poured throughout the room, so that the fire effectively started everywhere at once.

The inkblot char patterns on the floor were flammable liquid runs, Dale thought. The heavy floor-level burning in two of the corners was another sign of flammable liquid, since corners were, according to his training, "dead air spaces" that didn't burn readily in ordinary fires.

At about 1:30 P.M. a neighbor came to the Knapp house and called Chief Roberts to come look at the Knapps' cat, which a neighbor was holding. He found that much of the gray cat's fur was matted and soaked in something that smelled like Coleman fuel. Roberts carried the cat back to the Knapp house so McDaniel could smell it, but the cat broke free and fled before he could take a fur sample.

In the afternoon Dale examined the larger items of fire debris that were lying out on the lawn. There had been two beds in the room. One was a small crib mattress. Virtually all that remained of it were the metal springs.

The frame had a crease in it, and some springs had collapsed while others had not. Dale inferred that flammable liquid must have been poured underneath the portion where the springs had collapsed. Only where the flammable liquid had been poured had the temperatures been hot enough to anneal -- or deform -- the metal springs, he reasoned.

All in all, Dale concluded, so much of the damage in the room could only have been caused by flammable liquids that he estimated that the arsonist must have used at least a half-gallon to a gallon of flammable liquid -- presumably Coleman fuel.

By midday, Melba Burr, a friend of Louise's, had come by the Ramseys'. Burr was an outspoken, garrulous woman who worked as a cocktail waitress and lived within walking distance of the Ramseys'.

At about two o'clock Melba drove John, Linda, and Louise to the doctor, who gave them each a shot of the sedative Vistaril, according to the doctor's records. Melba then drove Linda and Louise back to the Ramseys', where they went to sleep, and drove John on to do some errands.

First, John asked to stop at his dentist's, who had just won a small claims judgment against Knapp three days earlier for an unpaid bill; Knapp owed an installment on the judgment in a few days.

Since the dentist wasn't in, Burr drove Knapp to the insurance claims office in Scottsdale.

There, claims representative Edward Moore explained to Knapp that his insurance was not going to cover the carpeting after all. Counting interest, John still owed more than $ 1,800 on that carpet.

What's the sense of having insurance if you're not protected by it, -- Knapp snapped at Moore.

Moore considered Knapp very callous to be fretting about such things after such a calamity. Melba Burr also noticed how angry Knapp was when he came back to the car. Here he had lost his two children, and all he could think of was his carpeting, she thought.

At 5:45 P.M., as the firemen and detectives were locking and sealing the fire scene at 7435 East Capri, Chief Roberts saw the gray cat he had seen earlier that day. He and a detective caught him and snipped off a fur sample where the smell of flammable liquid was strongest. They sealed it in a jar for testing.

Before leaving, inspector McDaniel took into evidence the half-full Coleman can that had been sitting on the bookcase to the left of the front door.

THAT EVENING, BETWEEN 7 AND 7:30, Lila Johnson, another friend of Linda's mother, came by the Ramseys' to pay her respects.

John's mother, Mary Knapp, arrived from California at about 8:00. Lila later said she was shocked by John and Mary's conversation.

They just "exchanged pleasantries," Lila later told a state investigator. She asked John whether he had insurance, and John told her all about it. Not once were the children mentioned. Well, maybe once. Mary Knapp saw the girls' pictures on top of the TV, and she remarked that she hadn't seen them in such a long time. But otherwise neither of them spoke one word about the babies -- just about material things.

They watched some television and, at ten o'clock, the news came on. The national news every night during this period revolved around the then-unfolding Watergate scandal. In fact, it was on the following night, Saturday, November 17, that President Richard Nixon told the nation, "I'm not a crook."

But the local news on November 16, 1973, focused on the tragic fire at 7435 East Capri. Lila got up and asked if she should turn it off, she later recalled, but John told her not to.

Lila considered John's attitude inappropriate.

John and Mary just showed "no emotion" all evening, she later told police. She was "falling apart," but John and his mother were just carrying on a normal conversation.

Later that evening, John borrowed a car from the Ramseys and went into Mesa. On his way back, at about 12:30 A.M., Knapp was in an accident, which was the other driver's fault. Knapp sat in the car and read a newspaper while a police officer did the paperwork.

-- Did you see this? -- John asked the officer, pointing to an article about the fire.

-- Yeah, I did. Terrible thing.

-- Those were my two children.

-- You're kidding.

-- No, -- John said, and he pointed out to the officer that the name and address on his driver's license were the same as those mentioned in the story.

Knapp showed no emotion, the officer thought.

The officer later became a witness against John.

So did Shirley Grenko, Jim Garrison, Molly Cameron, battalion chief Geary Roberts, Carolyn Goodman, James McDaniel, David Dale, Melba Burr, and Kenneth Templeton.

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