Speaker 1: Sword and Scale contains adult themes and violence, and is
not intended for all audiences.
Speaker 2: Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 3: She was literally burnt alive. There was not much left
of her body.
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consider joining plus and help keep us alive. This is
season twelve, episode two d and eighty nine of Sword
and Scale, a show that reveals it the worst monsters
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Barbara Way. It's a cold January morning in Buffalo, New York.
The sky is black and clear, the kind of stillness
that feels a little unnatural, a little unsettling, like the
city itself is holding its breath. Moonlight casts long shadows
across the snowy streets. Not even the wind stirs. Nothing
moves in this colt snap except a faint curl of
smoke rising in the distance, a warning no one has
noticed yet. At the local fire station, fire Marshal Paul
Simonian cradles another mug of coffee, hunched over his desk,
passing the time with paperwork. Then the call comes in
a fire on the east side. Within seconds, his team
is pulling on their gear, boots slamming against the concrete.
The fire engine roars to life as they tear through
the frozen streets towards the house on fire.
Speaker 4: So they get there, it's black, the rooms full of smoke.
You see a little glow on the floor and they say,
we have no fire on the first floor. We're in
the second floor. We see some rubbish, maybe a pile
of clothes burning in the center of the room.
Speaker 1: Paul listens to the radio. It seems like your typical
house fire. His men are on it. He turns back
to his work, keeping an ear on dispatch.
Speaker 4: Shortly after, the lieutenant called back said no, it's not rubbish.
We have a victim up here. We have a fatality.
Speaker 1: Paul shuts up, gets in his vehicle and speeds towards
the fire en route.
Speaker 4: I get to the fire scene, I go up to
the incident demand ask him what's going on. He says,
there's some occupants there across the street at a neighbor's house,
some brothers and a mom.
Speaker 1: I go, okay, the victim's family made it out. Now
they huddle inside a neighbor's house, away from the biting cold.
But inside, twenty eight year old Elizabeth Bell is dead.
Thick smoke curls from the top windows of the little house,
twisting into the night like something alive. Red and blue
lights slash across the neighbor's windows, shaking the street. Awake
neighbors step cautiously onto their porches, drawn by the unmistakable
pull of disaster. Only minutes before, firefighters were barking orders,
hauling hoses and attacking the inferno on the second floor.
But now the fire is out and the smoke is settled.
So when Paul arrives, he takes a breath, steadying himself.
Then he steps inside.
Speaker 4: Go on the front door. There's no visible fire at all.
Down on the first floor. I go to the back
of the house where the stairs are. I just start
seeing some smoke, smudge down the stairs and some fire debris.
Meet the lieutenant up there. He takes me and shows
me where Elizabeth is. She's in the back room of
the house. There's some big aquariums on the side with
some reptiles in it. There's fire damage in there, like ceiling,
heat damage and things like that. And our fire crews
did their overhauling wood, ripped down the ceilings, in the
walls and looking in the channels make sure there's no
more fire. And then we proceed to the front of
the house and there's a small little room on the left.
There was a little girl's bed in there, like a
Hello Kitty bed or something like that.
Speaker 1: But the little girl's room wasn't the place where the
fire originated, so Paul moved over to Elizabeth's bedroom, and.
Speaker 4: Then I went in Elizabeth's bedroom and you could see
the mattress was burned pretty good on a third of it.
Maybe there's a big mattress, maybe a king size mattress
burned into the box spring a little bit. There was
some fire damage in there, more heat damage.
Speaker 1: The fire started on Elizabeth's bet mattress was burned into
the box spring, black and charred, coiled springs flinging upwards
like a broken jack in the box. The fire on
her mattress was still petering out.
Speaker 4: The ceiling was down, some of the walls were torn down,
and I happened to just look, you know, I was
just looking across the room, seeing what's going on. I
look for candles, I'm looking for smoking, overloaded extension cords,
anything like that. And I see a piece of drywall
that's broken down and something's dripping on it, but it's
leaving a sheen like a rainbowchine.
Speaker 1: The oily rainbow machine made Paul do a double take.
He stepped closer. He knew what that was, he just
couldn't believe it.
Speaker 4: And there's a little juice bottle that's tipped over and
it's dripping. And I take a smell of that and
I notice it's gasoline. It smells like gasoline, like an accelerant.
My flag goes up. I go, oh, well, we probably
have a crime scene here. I'd go back out with
the lieutenant. I said, stop the overhauling, don't rip anything
else down anywhere, don't touch Elizabeth.
Speaker 1: Paul knew that spray of gasoline on Elizabeth's wall was
the beginning of their story. Now he had to find
out what the rest of it was. This looked like
the aftermath of a terrible accident or a desperate attempt
to end it all. The Buffalo Police Department was called
onto the scene. Paul racked his brain to figure out
what had happened to Elizabeth. It was also strange and
unsettling because Elizabeth lay splayed on the floor where she died,
wearing only a bra. The fabric fused to what was
left of her. She had clearly been sleeping when the
fire started, and it didn't start around her, it started
on her. Her stomach had been the source, and it
was charred beyond anything human.
Speaker 4: From her knees to her belly, you know, all in there,
her growing, her thighs, all that area, not her face,
her upper body, so it was all right there.
Speaker 1: It was a grizzly sight, something you should probably never
see in your lifetime. Elizabeth had hollowed out in the middle.
Her stomach was like the pit of a campfire.
Speaker 4: It's very disturbing because some of the areas red, some
is black. It's just burnt, burned like you burned food.
But Elizabeth was burned in some areas to the bone.
I could see her thigh.
Speaker 1: Paul and the investigators went across the street to talk
to you Elizabeth's family. The house was rented by Elizabeth's mother,
who lived there along with Elizabeth, her young daughter, and
Elizabeth's brother. When Paul and the investigators spoke with Elizabeth's brother,
he told them and how everything started that night.
Speaker 4: Then it kind of started really taking a twist that
her boyfriend came over, some yelling going on back and forth.
Speaker 1: Elizabeth's newly estranged boyfriend, Frank Brett Junior, had showed up
at the house in the middle of the night. Elizabeth's
brother said he came in and walked straight up to
her bedroom. Her brother heard some yelling and then an
earth shattering boom.
Speaker 4: And the one brother said he heard Frank come down
the backstairs very fast, and he opened up his bedroom
door or went into the kitchen, and he saw Frank
on fire and they were trying to put him out,
and he told the brother to go upstairs, help your sister,
and he ran out the back door.
Speaker 1: Frank fled the house on fire, leaving Elizabeth burning in
her bedroom and the horrid smell of smoke billowing behind him.
This is former Buffalo District Attorney John Flynn.
Speaker 3: He took off out of the house, went to the backyard,
jumped the fence, and then ran down the backyards to
another street, and he broke into a house on Leeroy
Street and hid in a closet.
Speaker 1: The flames were still clinging to Frank as he ran
like a madman, peeling off his burnding clothes and throwing
them behind him in the snow. He made it down
to the street before breaking into the first unlocked house
he could find.
Speaker 3: He's now hiding in the closet of this house that
he broke into. A little girl who lived in that
house wakes up Mommy and Daddy in their bedroom and says,
Mommy and Daddy, someone's in the house. Now, put yourself
in that situation. Okay, I got five kids, all right,
If one of my kids did that, I'd be like, no, honey,
you're dreaming. You had a bad dream. Go back to bed.
And that's exactly what dad did.
Speaker 4: Here.
Speaker 3: Well, Mom, now who's lying in bed, says hmm, I
think I smell something.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: Mom and Dad, you know, are kind of up in
the bed now and they're kind of sniffing now, and
Mom's like, yeah, I smell something, and so Dad gets up.
What he's smelling is burnt flesh.
Speaker 1: Unbelievable, the unmistakable smell wafting from the closet had given
Frank away.
Speaker 3: Dad follows the smell of burnt flesh into this closet
and opens the closet door. He now grabs this guy,
takes him out of the closet, takes him out of
the house, and throws him outside on the front lawn.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, police officers from the scene
Elizabeth's house had noticed Frank's trail in the snow and
started following it.
Speaker 4: Blood on fence posts and climbing over the fence, we
see clothing. They find a burned jacket behind a bush.
They're tracking this this person in the snow, the blood
trail in the snow, the clothing, climbing fences, broken picket fences,
and then they get a call. The police get a
call of somebody in a man's house around the corner.
Speaker 1: Frank lay in the snow on the front lawn, his
raw red flesh exposed to the elements. It was a
mess of soot and blood. But unlike Elizabeth, he was alive.
Speaker 3: Three different people in the neighborhood now have called nine
to one one and police fire first responders. Everyone's coming
in a neighborhood and as you can imagine there is
a blood trail of him running from the back these
backyard cards all the way down to where this house was.
Again unbelievable.
Speaker 1: It was unbelievable what had started as a routine house
fire had spiraled into chaos on the East side of Buffalo,
flame smoke, an injured child, and then something far worse,
a dead woman who looked like she'd been burned alive.
Frank was burned badly, too unrecognizable actually, but he was breathing,
and for investigators that meant one thing. If he survived,
he might be the only one who could explain what
really happened inside that house. But by the time that
he could speak, a story would already be taking shape,
one where investigators wondered if the fire started in Elizabeth's
hands or his. Twenty seven year old Elizabeth Bell had
been burned alive in her East Side home in Buffalo,
New York. What started as a routine house fire quickly
turned into a potential homicide investigation when firefighters discovered that
Elizabeth was the source of the inferno. Even more shocking,
her former boyfriend, Frank Brett Junior, had also gone up
in flames. He fled the scene, burning alive, only to
be caught after breaking into a stranger's home, his scorched
flesh giving him away. Elizabeth was pronounced dead at the scene.
Fire Marshal Paul Simonian hypothesized that gasoline had been thrown
on her torso and ignited. Elizabeth had stumbled and crawled
away from her bed into the hallway, where she passed
out and perished. During the chaos, Elizabeth's child had run too,
burning only the bottoms of her feet as she escaped
downstairs out the front door with the other members of
the house. No one else had been hurt in the
fire except Elizabeth and Frank, and the police were zeroing
in on Frank, after all, innocent people don't run and hide.
But Frank had been taken to the hospital, not a
holding cell.
Speaker 3: He was, like I said before, severely burned, like almost
dead burn. I suspect that you and your listeners have
heard in the past degrees of burns first degree, second degree,
third degree. They don't really use degrees anymore. I mean
some people do, but what they use now is the
terms superficial, partial thickness, and full thickness.
Speaker 1: A superficial burn is painful but tolerable. You've probably suffered
quite a few in your lifetime. Think of a really
bad sun burner, that flushy little lump you get when
you touch a hot pan. Partial thickness burns are more
severe and injure deeper layers of skin called the dermis.
This burn will take weeks to heal and is the
most painful because no damage has been done to the nerves.
This kind of burn is pretty agonizing, but a full
thickness burn destroys most of the dermis, getting right down
to the muscle and bone. The burn part of the
body is left with a waxy white appearance. It's completely terrifying.
A full thickness burn destroys most of the nerves. There's
no blister because the burn has gone so deep. It's
plowed through all that flesh, blood, and muscle.
Speaker 3: He had full thickness of burns throughout his body. He
had to have a cadaver skin graph done of his face.
He lost all of his fingers. They actually had to
put him in a induced coma to actually do the
skin graph of his face, and they had to graft
on new eyelids on his eyes to say he was
jacked up as an understatement of the century.
Speaker 1: Frank was a mummified version of the man he once was.
Just a day before, he had been a handsome, healthy,
thirty three year old man. Now he was a monster,
burned on ninety percent of his body, with stubs for
hands and ears that melted into the side of his head.
His lips looked like two banana slugs resting on an
old leather mask. He would never be the same again.
Karma's got a funny way of working, It really does.
It can be quite efficient too.
Speaker 3: There was no way he was leaving the hospital. He
was not a flight risk, so there was no There
was no rush to arrest him to keep him in jail.
He wasn't going anywhere. So in this case, we made
the decision to not arrest him right away and to
just work up our case, do the investigation, and then
put it in the grand jury.
Speaker 1: Parsimonian, the head Fire Marshal at the time was already
piecing together when had happened based on the evidence.
Speaker 4: You learn not to just rush to a snap judgment
because so many things could have happen. You know, you
don't know the players, you don't know what actually transpired.
In that bedroom. Who did what? Who said?
Speaker 2: What?
Speaker 4: I said? You got gasoline up here that doesn't belong
up here, so something's wrong there. You have a boyfriend
that ran out. They were both on fire. He didn't
state it or tried to help her. He ran out.
How badly is he burned? This is way before we
have any information about Frank, any threats he's made in
the past or history with Elizabeth.
Speaker 1: Frank may have been incapacitated, but Elizabeth's family was unharmed,
and they knew far too much about the couple. That
thirteen hundred square foot yellow house in Buffalo wasn't just
a home. It was a tight knit world where no
secret stayed hidden, especially between Elizabeth and Frank. Elizabeth Bell
was unconventional and eccentric. She was bold, passionate, im possible
to ignore. She had a deep love for animals, working
at a veterinary clinic and filling her home with strays
in need of care. Her aquarium teemed with reptiles and
a cage of ferrets rattled with energy, each one adored.
Her bedroom was like a zoo. In her early twenties,
she had a daughter from a previous marriage and was
raising her with the help of her mother. She was
the kind of woman who dyed her hair every color
of the rainbow. You know the type. You probably are
the type judging by our demographics data. Anyway, she thrived
in Buffalo's alternative scene, where music, misfits and mayhem collided.
That's where she met Frank, a fixture in their tight
knit friend group. They'd known each other for years, but
in twenty seventeen their friendship turned into something more.
Speaker 3: He had actually moved in with her into her mom's
house and was living there in the fall of twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: Frank was working in construction, doing odd jobs when he could.
He was just as wild to look at as Elizabeth,
with his long dyed red beard in alternative clothing. Think
punk rock meets medieval tavern vibes with a dash of
white guy with dreadlocks. That's the Fena type we're working
with here. But he was charismatic and kind. Even Elizabeth's
mother remembered how fond she had always been of Frank.
He was the type of guy who really locked eyes
with whoever he was talking to and made them feel
like they were the center of the universe. He had
a way about him that was inviting when he wanted
it to be. That is, Elizabeth and Frank were both
intense type people. She wielded words like weapons, and he
never backed down either. What had started as a blissful
relationship full of fun and excitement, quickly turned into toxicity.
When Frank moved in, things slowly got worse. It was
like he'd lost all his charismatic power being in their home.
The personality he had put forth to impress people was
washed away by tight living quarters. The real Frank started
to show that fall. Elizabeth's family all had to listen
to the couple's fights getting worse. They would be screaming
at each other well into the night. Two hard headed,
passionate people, both unwilling to give in. By December, it
was all over. Their relationship hadn't even lasted a year
before Elizabeth told Frank to get out. He didn't go
quietly either. On his way out, he put his fist
through a window.
Speaker 3: And he moved out. And again, now, this homicide occurred
on January eleventh, so he moves out now in December,
approximately a month before the homicide, and the breakup was
not smooth. It was a very contentious breakup.
Speaker 1: Frank packed up his things and left in a huff
to stay with his mom, who wasn't too far away.
Though they had separated, Elizabeth and Frank continued their fighting.
Speaker 3: That month from December to January was extremely contentious. Contentious,
you know, text messages going back and forth between the
two of them.
Speaker 1: Through the safety of their cell phones. They argued about
bills one party didn't pay, and stuff they needed back
from each other, you know that kind of stuff. They
hurled insults at one another like petty children via text.
Speaker 3: What really took it over the top was a bike
that he had that he left there.
Speaker 1: Frank's main way of getting around town was on his
beloved bike. But this wasn't just any old mountain bike.
He'd rigged it up to what he really fancied a
real special machine.
Speaker 3: And he put some kind of a fancy engine on
the bike, so he turned the bike into kind of like,
you know, a motorbike, all right, And so he had
this like souped up bike that he left there. Elizabeth
apparently put the bike to the curb, to the trash
and either someone picked a bike up or the garbage
men did and threw it.
Speaker 1: Away in an irritated rage, one afternoon, Elizabeth threw Frank's
bike on the curb, along with his tools, the tools
that his father had given him. She took a photograph
of the pile and texted it to Frank.
Speaker 3: The bottom line is that he lost his bike and
he believed that she threw it away, and he was livid.
At that point. There were text messages going back and
forth where he basically threatened a killer. He threatened a
burner like literally said I'm gonna burn you and your
whole fat fin family.
Speaker 1: After the threat, Elizabeth wrote to Frank, someone.
Speaker 5: Already thought your bike was trash. I'll bring everything else inside.
Please don't burn our fat selves down. Good thing I
paid for that bike. No love lost, he responded, not
a joke.
Speaker 3: He also made threatning remarks to his boss. So Frank
was kind of a handyman, laborer, construction kind of guy.
He worked for this one guy who became a witness
at trial. He basically told his boss that, hey, I'm
going to pay her back for what she did, or
I'm going to get her words of that effect.
Speaker 1: Frank had lost his mind. That bike had pushed him
to the point of no return. Elizabeth and Frank were
so innately intense that when it was good, it was euphoric,
but when it was bad, it was World War three.
And when she finally kicked him out, Frank had nowhere
to put the wreckage of his emotions. He didn't process it,
He didn't grieve, He just flipped the switch. The love
and passion he once felt for her all curdled into pure,
undiluted hate.
Speaker 3: The early morning hours of January eleventh, twenty eighteen, he
he got on a bike. Okay, kind of ironic that
he used a bike to go do the murder scene,
you can say that again. He did not break in.
The door was open. Apparently at three o'clock in the morning.
The adult brother who lived there was still up and
he saw him come in, and he didn't think anything
of it, because you know, he had lived there up
until a month ago. He was kind of coming in
and coming out, you know, and he was still around.
Speaker 1: Apparently Elizabeth's brother wasn't privy to all the intense drama
between her and Frank that was going on between the
two of them via texts and social media, so he
watched Frank walk upstairs and said nothing.
Speaker 3: He had with him a satchel, and in the satchel
he had like charcoal briquettes, you know that, you know,
like charcoly used on a grill, And he had lighter fluid.
He had a lighter and he also had a Hawaiian
punch container filled with gasoline.
Speaker 1: Frank went quietly into the room that he used to share.
He found Elizabeth asleep in her bed, and he undid
his satchel.
Speaker 3: She was asleep or perhaps passed out in the bed.
Now I say passed out because when the autopsy was
done there was a significant amount of alcohol in her system.
Speaker 1: Alcohol knocks you into a heavy sleep. It's like a
sleep so deep you wouldn't notice being moved, let alone
someone dripping liquid onto your skin.
Speaker 3: He took his Hawaiian punch bottle that he had with gasoline,
and he dumped it on.
Speaker 4: Her in the room, all over the bed, on the floor,
and some might have got on him. But there's fumes
now in that room. That whole room is like a
little bomb.
Speaker 1: Frank stood over a sleeping Elizabeth. His anger simmered as
he emptied the juice bottle, gasoline soaking into the sheets.
But like Paul said, the real danger wasn't just the liquid.
It was the fumes seeping into every inch of that
tiny bedroom, turning the air itself into a weapon.
Speaker 3: When he took us lighter out to light her on fire,
the whole room blew up.
Speaker 4: When that ignition happens and you're surrounded in fire, it's immediate.
It's like a flash over. Whatever he's wearing is on
fire now too.
Speaker 1: It happened in an instant. Flames roared to life and
gulfing Elizabeth. As her screams shattered the air, fire and
smokes swallowed the room. Then Frank felt the searing pain
his own skin was burning.
Speaker 4: He didn't realize that that was gonna flash on him.
Gasoling is so volatile, and the fumes, it's the fumes
that burn and flash, and then the gasoline just keeps
fueling the fire and the fumes. That's what's burning. There's
the fumes, not the liquid.
Speaker 1: Because the gasoline had been poured on Elizabeth, she was
on fire. She stumbled out of her room, grasping at
anything to help put her out, but it was useless.
The second floor was filled with black smoke, and she
couldn't breathe or see. She couldn't stop the fire that
was taking her life away.
Speaker 4: Elizabeth has gasoline on her so that the liquid gasoline
was still producing fumes, so it's like a source. It
just kept burning.
Speaker 1: But Frank was on fire too, and that was not
his plan. He left Elizabeth to burn alive and ran.
Speaker 4: Ten twelve feet. He made it down the stairs, saw
the brother with the commotion, said go help your sister,
and he ran out.
Speaker 1: Elizabeth's brother tried to smother the flames on Frank, but
it was useless. That's when Frank bolted out and broke
into the house down the street. Elizabeth's mother tried to
get up the stairs to reach her daughter, but the
smoke in the hallway choked her, the heat driving her back.
The fire was too fast, so she had no choice.
Leaving her daughter behind was agony, but no one could
get up those stairs. Elizabeth was left alone to burn.
Speaker 3: She was burnt so bad, just awful, awful, awful way
to die, burned alive alive.
Speaker 1: When the police found Frank on the neighbor's lawn, he
muttered the words motive an opportunity. Multiple first responders heard
it as police, prosecutors and fire investigators placed the case. Together,
they uncovered the how, but the why remained a haunting mystery.
Fire wasn't just a weapon here, It was a statement,
a slow, agonizing way to make someone suffer. If Frank
truly meant to burn the whole fucking fat family down
like he had threatened, why not torch the house? Why
make sure Elizabeth was the source. The brutality of all
of this set his crime apart.
Speaker 2: It's actually really really unusual for someone to use fire
to actually kill another human being. It's really unusual. I
can think of probably two or three examples in my
whole career, and I started working in fire setting over
fifteen years ago.
Speaker 1: Now this is Professor Teresa Gannon. She's a forensic psychologist
at the University of Kent who specializes in fire setting.
She became interested in arson when she was tasked with
analyzing a case involving fire as a weapon.
Speaker 2: Everyone presumes that people set deliberate fires, or try and
harm people with deliberate fires, or warn people off, or
send a message about their own distress because they're inappropriately
interested in fire. And quickly I became interested in the
fact that some of the people I was coming across
in clinical assessment and treatment. They didn't have an inappropriate
interest in fire, but they were still using it.
Speaker 1: Teresa started looking into deliberate fire setting. It turned out
that the field was vastly ignored by the rest of
forensic psychology.
Speaker 2: The field is probably about twenty years behind other fields
of criminal behavior, such as our understanding of sexualis or violence.
There are well over two hundred risk assessment tools for
people who've committed violence, and there are no properly developed
risk assessment tools for people who set deliberate fires. In fact,
that's something I'm currently working.
Speaker 1: On because Teresa is the go to specialist when it
comes to fire setting. Years ago, she and three other
researchers pioneered the multi trajectory of Adult fire setting theory,
or as it's known in the field, the MTAF.
Speaker 2: It talks about this theory the idea of fire setting scripts.
Now all of us, you and me have a script
about fire, and what that means is it's a cognitive
rule that we learn, usually as children, about how and
when fire should be used. With people who set deliberate fires,
what we propose is that they have learnt an inappropriate firescript.
Speaker 1: For example, Teresa once worked with a man who had
grown up on a farm. The common practice on the
farm was to set fire to any pest or rodent
that was destroying the crops. Later in adulthood, when his
wife became a pest to him, he decided to get
rid of her much in the same way.
Speaker 2: But I would argue that some individuals may learn that
fire was the best way to instill fear or to
punish another person for a supposed wrongdoing.
Speaker 1: We don't know what Frank had learned as a child
when it came to fire. He was never really given
a full psychological evaluation due to his year long hospital stay.
He also never claimed insanity. When Frank lived at Elizabeth's house,
he had an attitude of taking the law into his
own hands. There was that one time when he heard
Elizabeth's mom talking about him on a private phone call,
so he tore down the fence he'd built for her garden.
What a petty and childish way to handle hearing someone
talk behind your back. Teresa says that the biggest misconception
about criminals who use fire as a weapon is that
they're obsessed with it, that they love fire. But that's
not really true. At least that's usually not true. Most
people who set fires to cause harm fear it just
as much as anyone else.
Speaker 2: You show fire to any animal, it will kind of
back away, you know what I mean. It's very powerful
and evolutionary wise, we're kind of programmed to be scared
of it.
Speaker 1: The MTAF theory breaks down fire setters into five distinct
personality types. Frank would fall under the worst one, the
multifaceted fire setter.
Speaker 2: And these are individuals characterized by two kind of prominent factors.
They've got a fence, supportive attitudes that support criminal behavior,
and also inappropriate fire interest. So they're really interested in fires,
and they're really pro criminal behavior.
Speaker 1: Frank didn't have a criminal record that we know of,
but his responses to things not going his way were unhinged,
like when he broke Elizabeth's mom's garden fencer. When he
shattered the window after being told to move out. He
had no control over himself. He was just running on raw,
unchecked emotion. His life wasn't made up of planned actions,
but only a chain of knee jerk reactions to the
world around him. He was like a toddler.
Speaker 2: And I would argue that the case that you've been
talking about sits somewhere between the multifaceted the last one
I've just mentioned, and the grievance subtype, but maybe doesn't
fit them exactly. It shows you the breadth of motivators
lying behind fire setting.
Speaker 1: Beyond Frank's emotional immature, he lacked stability in his personal life.
Frank was in his thirties, and he had no family,
no career, and no home of his own. He was
in arrested development, living one day at a time and
avoiding adult responsibilities like so many do these days. Not
only was Frank vengeful, but he was also stupid. He
packed his satchel full of lighters, gasoline, and charcoal briquettes
with a loose game plan to murder Elizabeth by setting
her on fire. He didn't know anything about the way
fumes worked and ended up blowing himself up too. There's
a poetic justice to his disfigurement. Somehow, there's art here
in all the pain and horror. By the time he
was well enough to be discharged from the hospital, District
Attorney John Flynn and his team had already received a
warrant for his arrest and an indictment from the grand jury.
Speaker 3: We then went to the hospital, took a judge with
us to the hospital, and we arraigned him in his
room in the hospital, and that's when the legal proceedings started.
Speaker 1: Frank was facing first degree murder charges for the intentional
death of Elizabeth Bell. When prosecutors visited his hospital room,
they gave him a choice, plead guilty or go to trial.
So he lawyered up, ready to go to court. Waste
everybody's time and money, I might add, But according to Frank,
everyone had it wrong. Only he knew what had happened
in Elizabeth's bedroom that night, and when he finally spoke,
his words would leave everyone stunned. Elizabeth had started the fire.
Elizabeth Bell had burned alive in her East Buffalo home
for a month. She'd been fighting with her ex boyfriend,
Frank Brett Junior over their breakup. One afternoon, she took
his beloved electric bike and left it on the curb
for someone else to take. She texted Frank a photo
of his bike, and he lost his mind. He threatened
to burn her whole fucking and even told his boss
how angry he was that his bike was gone. Frank
had packed a satchel of charcoal, briquettes, lighter fluid, and gasoline.
Then he went over to Elizabeth's house at three point
thirty in the morning. Within minutes, her bedroom exploded, Elizabeth
was burned alive, and Frank escaped death by the skin
of his teeth, speaking of which there wasn't much left.
After a nearly year long hospital stay with burns on
ninety percent of his body, Frank was ready for court.
He was a disfigured monster with clubs for hands, melted ears,
and a big bald star on his head where his
hair used to grow. But Frank said that he didn't
start the fire. Elizabeth did. He claimed that he only
went there to talk about the bike. She woke up,
their fight escalated, and then she was the one who
threw the gasoline on him. She was the one who
struck the lighter. It seemed a little, I don't know, bullshitty.
But then Elizabeth's brother said something that cast a dark
shadow of doubt on the whole trial.
Speaker 3: When the police interviewed the brother. At the end of
the brother's statement, the brother made a comment along the
lines of, you know, I didn't go upstairs. I didn't
see what happened. I didn't see her do it, you know,
I don't know what happened. Maybe she lit him on fire.
Speaker 1: It was such an odd thing to hear. The possibility
of it being true lingered in the air. The police
may have been focused on the wrong person the entire time,
trying to convict an innocent victim instead of a cold
hearted killer. Frank might have been the real victim in
all of this. After all, it was Elizabeth's mother who
admitted that her daughter had a sharp tongue and she
could say things that would cut you to the bone.
There were only two people in the bedroom that night,
and one of them was dead. The other one was
facing life in prison.
Speaker 3: Why the brother would say that. I have no idea
not to be disparaging of the brother, because he lost
his sister. It was traumatic. So I'm not trying to
beat the brother up here, but let's be honest. He
sees this guy walk in the house at three o'clock.
Speaker 4: In the morning.
Speaker 3: He moved out a month earlier. If I was a brother,
I'd be like, what the hell you do in my
house at three in the morning, all right, But he
didn't think anything other and let him walk upstairs, you know.
So again I'm not blaming him, don't get me wrong.
But again he did make the meant to the police
in his interview.
Speaker 1: And that comment was what the defense hung their hat on.
Frank's trial didn't start until twenty twenty three, almost five
years after the murder, and he had acquired very good
defense lawyers. They fought hard to create reasonable doubt for
the jury. Frank sat motionless in the courtroom. The jurors
tried to focus on the case, but their eyes kept
drifting towards his grotesque mutilations and scars.
Speaker 3: The defense lawyers made the argument that she was drunk.
She had a lot of alcohol in her system. The
defense lawyers said that at trial that she also had
drugs in her system, but there was no proof of
that at all. There was proof of alcohol in her system, though,
to be fairer, and so they made the argument that
she got up in a drunken super They got into
an argument she dumped the gas on him, she lit
him on fire, and that's what happened.
Speaker 1: Frank's defense not only grossly disparaged Elizabeth by claiming she
was on drugs, but it crumbled against the physical evidence.
Speaker 3: His DNA was on the Hawaiian punch bottle and the lighter,
and he left the Hawaiian punch bottle in the apartment
and the lighter. The lighter was found on the stairs.
Speaker 1: There was another detail too. Besides the threats Frank made
telling Elizabeth that he would burn her and her family,
he also texted his mother right before he got to
Elizabeth's house that night. He wrote, I love you, Mama always.
It was ominous, to say the least.
Speaker 3: He left a trail of blood, he left the trail
of burnt flesh, and he left the trail of witness.
Speaker 1: And all those witnesses took this stand in court, the
first responders who all heard Frank say mode of an opportunity,
the neighbor who pulled Frank out of his closet, Elizabeth's brother,
Frank's boss, and all the medical experts who examined her body.
Oh yeah, and of course they had Paul Simonian, the
fire marshal who helped crack the case.
Speaker 4: I remember when I finished testifying, I walked down. As
I walked out, Elizabeth's mother was in the back pew,
and she reached over and grabbed my hand and just
said thank you.
Speaker 3: In this case, he admitted he was there. He admitted
Elizabeth died, He admitted that he sent these text messages. Okay,
he just didn't admit to how it went down in
the bedroom, which again that's very, very unusual. But it
obviously thanked God it didn't work.
Speaker 1: Maybe if Frank had pleaded guilty to the obvious, he
might have gained some leniency from the judge, but he
stuck to his lie. Forensic psychologist and fire expert Teresa
Gannon had some theories as to why if.
Speaker 2: You don't want to admit to yourself that you set
the fire or commits the crime or whatever. Also, you
can lose a significant amount of social support if you
do admit that you did do it. So by remaining
in denial, you know, you still get visitors or people
still believe you might not have done it, whereas as
soon as you admit it, of course, you might lose
the last remnants of social support.
Speaker 4: That you have.
Speaker 1: Maybe he was afraid of losing what little love and
support he had left in the world, and that is
why Frank refused to accept responsibility. Maybe he was just
lying to himself for comfort, telling himself something that he
knew deep down wasn't true. If he admits to this
heinous thing, then maybe it wasn't his fault that he's
a disfigured monster in prison. But by denying his own accountability,
Frank lost the little shred of dignity he had left.
Now he's just a pathetic killer, a sick liar.
Speaker 3: To be honest with you, this really wasn't rocket science,
you know. It wasn't really a tough case to prove.
Ninety nine out of one hundred homicide trials take a week,
maybe two weeks at the most. Okay, so this was
a typical homicide trial. Took about a week and the
jury was out like three or four hours and came
back with a guilty verdict on the intentional murder, and
the judge gave him the max, which was twenty five
the life. He drew a tough judge him. Quite frankly,
he drew the best judge in the building from my perspective,
because this judge is the hardest judge on criminals.
Speaker 1: Frank was sent to green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville,
New York. His earliest possible release date is April of
twenty forty three. But for now he sits in that
prison in his wheelchair, wearing a star of David and
Kippa or Yamica, claiming he's found religion. We contemplated reaching
out to Frank, but then we decided not to after
speaking with John Flynn. Frank is so obviously guilty that
we didn't want to entertain his lives. But another network did,
and we'll just tell you what he claims happened on
that very day. Frank says that on the night it
all happened, he and Elizabeth had a brutal fight. She
had conf him about being abused by a friend at
the age of eight, and in a moment of cruelty,
he told her the abuse was her fault. He wanted
to wound her, just as she had wounded him with
her words time and time again. He claimed. He turned
to leave, then something hit him over the head. The
next memory he had was waking up on the floor,
surrounded by smoke and flames. He says he immediately became
concerned about Elizabeth's daughter and pushed his way into her
little bedroom, heroically grabbing her from her bed and rushing
downstairs to safety. Then he fled, But that's all completely untrue.
In case you haven't figured it out, Elizabeth's mom, her daughter,
and her brother all confirmed that things happened the way
the prosecution argued it did. Despite the cold, hard evidence,
Frank continues to deny what he did. He continues to
believe his own lie. But we do not We know
what he did. We have brains. He poured gasoline on
a twenty eight year old mother and burned her alive
because she got rid of his bike. It's nothing but
pure evil, demonic if you really think about it.
Speaker 4: No, I didn't feel any satisfaction that he was guilty
because it's it's not a win win anywhere. Elizabeth lost
her life, Frank is physically mentally damaged, His freedom's taken
away from him. There was no satisfaction that he was found.
I mean, he just had to be held accountable for
what he did.
Speaker 3: You get to the point where you do something like
that and you're not thinking clearly, obviously you're you're you're
an enraged, psychopathic killer. And I use that word psychopath,
you know, not in a medical sense, but in a
just a human sense, that you are a sick killer.
There are very few smart criminals out there there are some,
but you know he wasn't one of them.
Speaker 1: Obviously, fire is a force beyond human control. It's ancient, primal,
and merciless. Once unleashed, it obeys no one, not even
the man who strikes the match. Frank thought he was
in charge of that fire, but like everything else in
his life, it was wrong. Frank's actions that night were
like a game where he moved blindly, reacting instead of thinking,
never seeing more than one step ahead. Even the contents
of his satchel define his stupidity. Charcoal briquettes, I mean,
what's your plan? Are you starting a barbecue? You ever
like charcoal briquettes? You know how long it takes to
light charcoal briquettes. What kind of a fucking idiot brings
that to a murder scene to lay them on Elizabeth
and start a campfire on her? I don't know if
there's a word in the English language to define how
stupid that is. Maybe he thought he'd use them to
start a small fire downstairs, to in fact burn the
whole fucking fat family down like he wanted to, but
changed his mind when he saw her brother was still awake.
The lighter fluid the gasoline. That makes sense, I guess,
but I'll never understand why those briquettes were in his bag. Never,
the guy must have never started a barbecue in his
entire adult life.
Speaker 4: Interesting.
Speaker 1: There's another question that lingers too. He saw that her
brother was awake, and yet Frank went forth with his
plan to set Elizabeth on fire. Just really let that
ruminate for a minute. Frank was not afraid of getting caught,
because if he was, he would have turned around at
the first sight of a witness. Instead, he just plowed ahead,
and like every other insane choice he's ever made leading
up to that fire, his final move was just as
short sighted. He was a man ruled by unregulated emotion,
a creature of impulse rather than intellect, rage rather than reason.
You know, anybody like that, because there's a lot of
people like that around in my day to day kind
of makes you think, doesn't it. Frank, however, didn't think.
He didn't understand that fire wouldn't stay contained, that it
wouldn't follow his orders, that the fumes would turn that
little bedroom into a bomb. He believed he was orchestrated
some grand act of revenge over his bike, when in reality,
he was just an idiot, igniting the fuse to his
own destruction. John Flynn was right. Frank wasn't just a murderer.
He was a fool, a man too wrapped up in
his own bitterness and failures to see the inevitable consequences
of his own actions, A man who, for all his hatred,
ended up punishing himself more than anyone else ever could.
How shakespearean is that Elizabeth Bell died in agony, her
final moments spent in a nightmare no human should ever endure.
But at least her pain ended, at least she's free
from it. Frank, on the other hand, has to live
with the aftermath. He has to wake up every day
with the scars and the missing hands, with the mangled face,
living in a reminder of his own stupidity. The man
who thought he was in control but ended up losing
everything in his final failure, He created a hell on
earth just for him, and it will haunt him for
the rest of his life. Oh geez, don't leave yet,
your lollipops. We're gonna load up the store with a
bunch of additional merch from my garage, so go check
it out. It's gonna be on deep Deep discount. I
need to get rid of it. Lots of people are
shit stuff, lots of cool stuff. Just go look go look.
It's like super super super cheap, Stay Safe
Speaker 2: Port