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Maybe Manchurian Candidates are being programmed to be firefighters in order to have access to the land. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Do Firefighters Like to Set Fires? July 9, 2002 By ERICA GOODE Terry Lynn Barton was trained to spot the first glimmerings of fire in the Pike National Forest in Colorado, where she worked as a seasonal employee for the United States Forest Service. Leonard Gregg was a part-time firefighter on the Fort Apache Indian reservation in Arizona. So it was perhaps predictable that the arrest of Ms. Barton and Mr. Gregg, who are charged with starting the largest wildfires in the histories of their respective states, would revive the notion that firefighters and others whose work involves putting out fires were also more prone to set them. Arson, an environmentalist in the Northwest declared confidently in newspaper accounts after the arrests, is wildfire fighters' "dirtiest little secret." A former fire department engineer in Arizona told a reporter that most arson fires were started by active or retired firefighters - a fact he said he had learned in his training. But forensic experts who study arsonists say there is no evidence to support the idea that firefighters are any more prone to sparking fires than anyone else. "It's an urban myth," said Paul Schwartzman, an expert on juvenile fire setters and a member of the National Fire Protection Association's education board. "They're no more highly represented than other groups." His assessment was echoed by Dr. David J. Icove, an engineer and arson specialist with the Tennessee Valley Authority police. Firefighters are no more drawn to arson "than police officers are to crime," Dr. Icove said. To be sure, there are cases of fire professionals betraying their public mission, and some notorious ones at that. John Orr, an arson investigator and fire captain in Southern California, was convicted of setting three fires on his way home from a convention of his colleagues in 1987. Mr. Orr, now in prison, denied his guilt, but investigators found an unpublished novel he had written about an arson investigator who set fires. Paul Keller, the so-called Seattle arsonist, who ignited fires in the early 1990's, was a fire buff who tried hard to become a firefighter. "Luckily, everybody turned him down," said Dr. Marcel Chappuis, a clinical psychologist who has studied arsonists and is a consultant to the Salt Lake City Fire Department. He said Mr. Keller would set fires and then time how long it took the fire department to arrive. "He'd go right in the middle of two fire districts and see who got there first," the psychologist said. "He knew all about engines and water capacity." During times of economic hardship - the Great Depression, for example - firefighters who were paid for hourly work set blazes to earn money: federal prosecutors in Arizona have claimed that Mr. Gregg, charged with igniting the brush and timber that started Arizona's Rodeo fire on June 18, did so for money. As a seasonal firefighter, his $8 an hour job depended on having fires to fight. Ms. Barton, a mother of two daughters who worked part-time for the forest service, told investigators she had in anger burned a letter from her estranged husband in a campfire ring, and the fire got out of control. Both Ms. Barton and Mr. Gregg have pleaded not guilty to setting the fires. Timothy G. Huff, a former analyst in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's profiling unit who works as a consultant to law enforcement groups, had little difficulty finding arson cases committed by firefighters for an F.B.I. study in 1994. The cases stood out so prominently to fire investigators that Mr. Huff had simply to do a little informal polling at training sessions across the country to collect his sample. The primary motive among the 75 firefighters, who alone or in groups were responsible for 182 fires, was a need for power and excitement, Mr. Huff found. Revenge was the most infrequent motive for arson, though in one case a volunteer firefighter torched a fire station, and in another a group of demoralized firefighters set fires to get back at their disliked chief. Yet the former F.B.I. analyst also disputed that firefighting and fire setting were linked in any systematic way. Of the million or so firefighters in the United States, Mr. Huff pointed out, only a tiny fraction are known to have committed arson, and no data exist indicating this number is disproportional. Still, neither Mr. Huff nor other experts were surprised that such an idea would exert a folkloric pull. People have a lot of misguided beliefs about arsonists, they said. Take the term pyromania, a label frequently used by law enforcement officials and in public discussions of fire setting. Pyromania also appears as a diagnostic category on the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental disorders. Descriptions of people impelled to set fires by a need for sexual or other gratification stretch back to Sigmund Freud's era and beyond. Freud himself suggested that pyromania represented a male perpetrator's denial of his instinctual drive to put out fires by urinating on them. But modern researchers say that arsonists who get a sexual thrill from their handiwork are extremely rare and that the term is used far too loosely. It is normal for young children to be fascinated by flames, and the lure of the hearth and the campfire endure into adulthood. Firefighters, several experts said, may have a strong interest in fire, but satisfy it in a healthy way through their jobs. And occasionally, an arsonist may think about fire obsessively. But Mr. Huff, for his part, argues that viewing compulsive fire setting as a distinct mental illness makes no sense. In a paper appearing in January in The Fire and Arson Investigator, a publication of the International Association of Arson Investigators, the former F.B.I. official and two colleagues, Dr. Icove and Gordon P. Gary, say pyromania is a myth. Every case of arson, they contend, can be explained either as a deliberate criminal act carried out for revenge, profit or other motives or as a byproduct of other mental disorders. Interviews the authors conducted with 150 arsonists in prisons, jails or mental hospitals found that none met the criteria for pure pyromania generally employed by mental health professionals. Instead, the fire setters, even those who were psychotic, described their motives as falling within a number of categories: excitement, revenge, extremism (arson aimed at making of a political point, like the torching of an abortion clinic), profit, covering up another crime or vandalism. Despite many people's fondness for the word pyromania, the authors wrote, those who use it rarely agree on what they are talking about. To prove their point, they asked 548 fire investigators to define pyromania and found that the definitions varied widely, though each meaning was staunchly defended by its champion. "The current usage of the classification 'pyromania' may be an oversimplification of a complex issue wherein the fire-setting acts are the end result," Mr. Huff and his colleagues concluded. What researchers do agree on is that fire setters are overwhelmingly male - Ms. Barton, should she be convicted of intentionally setting Colorado's Hayman fire, would be an exception - and that many adult arsonists ignite their first blazes as children. "More often than not where you find repeated fire setting there's a long history where there's been no intervention," said Mr. Schwartzman, the expert on arson by juveniles. National crime surveys find that juveniles account for more than 50 percent - 54 percent in 1999, according to F.B.I. statistics - of arson arrests. For both juveniles and adults, Mr. Schwartzman noted, fire setting can be a cry for help, a way to express anger, relieve stress or exact revenge, or a bid for attention. Some arsonists, he added, have learning disabilities or neurological impairment. Others are calculating criminals. In many cases, Mr. Schwartzman and other experts said, the act of lighting the fire is precipitated by stress, conflict or the onset of emotional illnesses like depression. "These guys don't go around setting fires every day," Dr. Chappuis of Salt Lake City said. "The fire setting tends to piggyback on other psychological symptoms." Still, if the chilling personal account by a female fire setter, published last year under the pseudonym Sarah Wheaton in the journal Psychiatric Services, offers any indication, fire is often on the habitual arsonist's mind. Ms. Wheaton, first admitted to a psychiatric hospital in 1993 after she set five fires on the University of California campus where she was an undergraduate, was described by the hospital's psychiatrists as "a highly intelligent, highly active young woman who had been the president of her high school class for all four years," according to a discharge summary she included in her journal article. Yet she confessed in the piece that fire had held for her a lifelong fascination, and that she often set fires to relieve feelings of abandonment, loneliness, boredom, anxiety or emotional arousal. "Each summer I look forward to the beginning of fire season as well as the fall - the dry and windy season," Ms. Wheaton wrote. "I never plan my fire, but typically drive back and forth or around he block or park and walk by the scene I am about to light on fire," she continued. "I set fires only in places that are secluded, such as roadsides, back canyons, cul-de-sacs and parking lots. I usually set fires after nightfall because my chances of being caught are lower then." When she was not setting her own fires, Ms. Wheaton wrote, she investigated fires that were not her own, read about fires and arsonists and had dreams about "fires that I have set, want to set or wish I had set." But the thrill of the fire died with its embers. "At this time I feel sadness and anguish and a desire to set another fire," she wrote. "Over all, it seems that the fire has created a temporary solution to a permanent problem." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/09/health/psychology/09FIRE.html?ex=1027207132&ei=1&en=1c292a36265ff5c5 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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