The Happy Wednesday midweek listeners or fill in the blank if you're listening on any other day of the week.

I'm Payton moorland and our story this week begins much like last week's episode.

A house on fire, a family found dead inside, a blaze

intentionally set in the middle of the night, the perfect time for a killer to work under a cloak of darkness with the otherwise

potentially watchful eyes of neighbors shut for the night and plenty of time to

escape before the inferno spreads and attracts attention.

By that time evidence is destroyed and maybe, just maybe, authorities will rule the fire and the deaths accidental.

But what murderers in their arrogance and in their narcissism

often underestimate is the degree to which professionals like fire

investigators and forensic pathologists know what they're doing and there's no

formal training for becoming a murderer the way there is for the investigators trying to get to the bottom of a tragic unsolved mystery

that's why killers even the ones characterized as brilliant by media outlets looking for a sensational angle.

They have such a gaping hole in their morality and logic that it renders them kind of dumb in a way.

When you've got main character syndrome like many murderers do, you're looking

at the world through a distorted lens. It's a blind spot. A blind spot that's ultimately a killer's vulnerability.

It's what often leads to them getting caught.

Our story begins on August 29, 1994 on a quiet residential block in Vinton, Virginia on the southeast edge of Roanoke.

It was a little before 5 a.m. on a Monday morning. It was still dark outside.

Robert Arnie was on his way home from work to attend to his pregnant wife.

She was several months in and she'd called him up in the middle of the night

complaining she wasn't feeling well. So being a good husband Robert left work early to be there for

her. But as he was driving past the house at 232 East of Virginia Avenue, a house he'd never paid any attention to before this moment, a monstrous plume of black smoke wafted across the highway looking like an evil spirit

...