Hey everyone, I'm super excited to tell you about a new True Crime podcast. I think you're really going to love, called Firebug.

It comes from the creator of Crime Town, The Jinx, and Morally Indefensible, True Crime legend Mark Smirling.

In the 1980s, an elusive serial arsonist terrorized Southern California, lighting up whole neighborhoods and burning down businesses in broad daylight.

Investigators spent years trying to track him down, but the fires never stopped.

That is, until Eccryptic manuscript circulating Hollywood, led them down a new path.

Take a listen.

Every fire has a starting point.

The layers of soot, the torch furniture, the charpatters on the wall, all of it leads back to a point where the fire started with a spark.

In the world of arson, it's called the point of origin. That was the name of the book I heard about on the radio 30 years ago.

Points of origin. Now I have a copy of it in my hands.

It describes a lot of fires set by an arsonist named Aaron Stiles, but the first and most deadly was at a hardware store called Cal's.

The hardware business prospered in the small communities south of Pasadena. Hardware stores such as Cal's did well.

Madeline Paulson went to the cluster of stores at least twice a week to shop.

Tonight, she was babysitting with her three-year-old grandson, Matthew.

She took him to the Basque and Robbins ice cream store.

And while standing in the parking lot, sharing a chocolate mint cone, she decided to entertain Matthew further by walking through Cal's.

Madeline and Matthew had less than six minutes to live.

As she rounded a corner, she almost ran into a man walking with his hands in his pockets.

She heard his breath suck in and he mumbled his apologies as he continued on and she continued to the back of the store with Matthew.

Aaron glanced back over his shoulder and breathed the sigh of relief as he saw the woman in the kid who were walking away from the area of his device.

He pulled out his wallet and looked into it while he walked through an empty checkout line.

Again, his play worked. No one paid any attention to him.

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