The reality is, you know, before the arsonist arrest, I did not know much about the profiling

of arsonists, except what we generally knew.

This person may have been lonely, depressed, and felt alienated from people, and that

fire-setting may be a way to assert some form of power out there in the world.

And that is really the extent of what I knew.

This is Dave Jamison, a one-time reporter for the Washington City Paper in Washington,

DC.

Back in 2003, when he was a budding journalist, Jamison stumbled onto a story, a series

of fires that would be linked to one of the most prolific and bizarre arsonists in history.

I could not really imagine, and I didn't fathom what was actually motivating him, which

I later found out.

Jamison was just an intern, working for another reporter who wanted to cover the many fires

that were happening around DC.

It was one of my first reporting gigs, and I was working for a guy named Eric Wemple,

who had this idea to just cover fires that were happening around the city.

It's kind of an oblique way to write about poverty, because most of the fires tended

to happen in poorer neighborhoods.

In that summer, they heard about a series of strange arson fires that had perplexed

authorities.

This arsonist was setting their fires in occupied buildings in the middle of the night.

They always seemed to be residential houses.

There would be a device placed at a doorway to the house, and this was a jug of some kind,

...