Backfire

What is this? What's going on? Her mother's frantic questions went unanswered. Her father remained mute. Janet cast them a beseeching look. One of the deputies spoke up again.

Janet Danahey, you are being arrested for murder.

The prosecution would call it a Valentine's Day act of revenge by a scorned lover; the defense would insist it was an accident, just a stupid college prank gone tragically awry. What both sides agreed on was this: Janet Danahey never meant to harm anyone, much less commit murder, when she set a fire that burned out of control at the Campus Walk apartment complex in Greensboro. She had never met the man and three women who perished on the top floor.

Debate raged over the fate of the young arsonist facing life in prison or execution. Ultimately, the most perplexing questions raised by the case would prove to be not legal but ethical. The fire in many ways, it seems, never really went out, burning still through the lives of everyone it touched in unexpected ways.

Valentine's Day

In a state admired for the lyric beauty of its coastline on one side and its mountains on the other, Greensboro is sandwiched in the unremarkable middle, a college town where plenty of students cling to the campus neighborhoods after graduation day. A year after earning her degree in business administration from the University of North Carolina, Danahey was temping as a $12-an-hour gofer.

Things were no better on the personal front. Thad Johnston, her boyfriend of six months, had just dumped her. She described the split as amicable, but Johnston remembers her hysterical and in tears the last time he saw her, the day before the fire.

On that Feb. 14, Danahey invited two girlfriends over for pasta. They shared a couple of bottles of wine and sometime after midnight, decided to play a prank on Danahey's ex. Statements given to authorities and Danahey's own account provide matching versions of what happened next:

After abandoning an initial plan to pour fish oil into Johnston's radiator, Danahey suggested setting something on fire instead. Johnston and his pals had set a neighbor's welcome mat ablaze, and Johnston's roommate, Victor Medina, once jumped his skateboard over a flaming beanbag chair in the parking lot. Grabbing the can of lighter fluid beneath Danahey's sink, the girlfriends headed to Campus Walk a block away. Danahey ventured alone to the rear of the darkened apartment complex and climbed stairs to the breezeway on the second floor.

"I heard laughter from the apartment and saw lights on and that Victor was home," Danahey said later in an interview. She recalled glimpsing Medina through the sliding glass door, though Medina insists he was asleep in bed, that the apartment was dark.

Danahey quietly leaned over the balcony to squirt lighter fluid on a small box of Christmas decorations, then flicked a cigarette lighter. The tinsel inside simply melted in a puff of chemical fumes. She doused an old futon that, Johnston later recalled, had been the scene of romantic encounters. She flicked the lighter again. Just a low, blue flame, Danahey insists. She giggled and ran.

Campus Walk was a relatively new complex, 12 apartments on three floors, full of college kids or recent grads, most of them asleep at that hour.

The calls came across the 911 switchboard in a frantic burst around 2:30 a.m.