Investigators: N.Y. fire likely set to hide 4 slayings
ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Four people who were found dead by firefighters in an apartment on early Monday morning were likely killed before the fire began.
As soon as their bodies were discovered on the third level of the home, firefighters called homicide investigators to the scene.
Police officials later acknowledged they were investigating the fire as an arson, and sources close to the investigation said they believe the fire may have been set to hide the murders or taint the crime scene.
Fire officials said there was only smoke coming from the windows when they arrived. The fire, in the staircase between the second and third floors, took about 15 minutes to put out and was confined to the wall space adjoining the stairs.
No additional details were released Tuesday as the Medical Examiner's Office continued to work to identify the two male and two female victims.
Arson as a means for concealing crime is something that's been studied extensively by the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, and they consider it one of the six major categories of arson.
Typically, the goal in such a case is to impede an investigation by destroying evidence, delaying or preventing the identification of the victim, and to obscure the fact that a homicide has occurred.
But that's a more difficult task than the layperson might realize.
Mary Jumbelic, a forensic pathologist who served as Onondaga County's chief medical examiner from 1998 until 2009, says that even when a person's body is badly burned on the outside, evidence within the body can remain intact.
"In a normal fire, you can still can get blood and tissue to test for carbon monoxide and determine whether a person died before or after the fire started," she said. "Typically, a person killed during a fire will die from smoke inhalation, and that will be apparent from CO levels found in the blood during an autopsy."
Even when a body has been burned beyond recognition, teeth and medical devices — such as an artificial knee — will remain to aid in identification, Jumbelic said.
A medical examiner will also look for bullets lodged in the body, or marks left on bones from sharp instruments or blunt objects that can help determine the cause of death. None of those things would be destroyed in a fire.
"If you ask a funeral director, they'll tell you it takes temperatures of 1,500 degrees or more for several hours to cremate a body and completely destroy it," she said. "That's not typical in a fire, even when accelerant has been used."
Jumbelic, a nationally recognized specialist in mass disaster scenes, was among the coroners who helped identify victims of the TWA Flight 800 crash, the World Trade Center and Hurricane Katrina.