On August 15, 1989, an overheated car pulled to the side of a road in Stockton, California. The owner was a man we’ll call Joseph Villa. Joseph inspected the damage while his wife and son looked on. He decided that he and his son should walk to the nearest phone. On the way, they noticed a camouflage jacket on the ground. Inside a pocket was an unlabeled videotape.
Two police officers watching the arsonist's tape on a small television
They looked for clues to his identity
Joseph and his son decided to take the video home and watch it. The video was of a house on fire. The family immediately turned it over to police, who were convinced that the person holding the camera had also set the fire. Captain Frank Curry of the California Department of Forestry assumed the disturbing voice heard on the tape belonged to the arsonist:
“I’ve never run across anything as eerie as this tape. It frightened me. As a matter of fact, I thought about it that night when I went to bed.”
Captain Curry and investigators studied the videotape in order to pinpoint the location of the fire:
“When we listened to the tape, it was hard to understand certain words that this person was saying. So we sat down and we actually went through this tape, I mean hundreds of times and came up with a script. He says, I told you I’d do it Omar. Is Omar the property owner? It’s a revenge type burn. Is Omar the construction person that maybe hired this person and fired him and made that a revenge motive for the fire? We really didn’t know who Omar is.”
An investigator kneeling down next to a small ceramic skull left at the scene
Was the arsonist a Satan worshiper?
A county arson investigator accompanied Joseph Villa’s brother to the spot where the tape had been discovered. Amazingly, the jacket was still there. In it they found a wooden pestle, the kind used to grind herbs for satanic rituals. Nearby, they also found a glove that matched the jacket and a ceramic skull. According to Captain Curry, the skull suggested Satanism, as did the words of the arsonist:
“Those are basically the clues, all we have on the video and that’s why we need to find out where this went down. Where is this home? As we viewed the tape, we realized that there was fire suppression equipment that had responded to the incident. And we thought if we can enhance the tape, bring those shots in a little bit closer to us, we may be able to get a door mark or a house number or maybe even a fire department insignia on the door.”