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The Snow Globe That Proved a Fire Wasn't Accidental · Mystery Stories and Unsolved Cases

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On November fourteenth, twenty twenty three, a sixty one year
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: old church volunteer reached into a storage box expecting winter coats.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: What he pulled out instead was a four inch snow globe,
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: clean as the day it was made, bearing a strip
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: of masking tape on the underside. Written on that tape
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: in faded but legible ink, Tracy Mills Nove two thousand
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: and one. No tenea holan, no smoke damage, no heat
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: crazing on the glass. Tracy Mills had died in a
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: fire twenty two years earlier. The official record said it
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: was an accident, an unattended candle left too close to
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: a curtain. Her sister believed that for two decades, and
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: yet someone had saved one object from that burning house,
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: labeled it with Tracy's name and the month she died,
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: and hidden it in a church storage unit that had
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: no connection to Tracy Mills whatsoever. That snow globe should
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: not exist, and the fact that it did would unravel everything.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: Tracy Mills was thirty eight years old in the autumn
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: of two thousand one. She worked as a dental hygienist
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: at a small practice on Garfield Avenue in Merrow Falls, Ohio,
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: and by every account she was meticulous in the way
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: people who genuinely love their work tend to be. Her
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: patience remembered her by name, her coworkers remembered her laugh.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: She rented the lower half of a duplex on Emerson Street.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: The apartment was tidy, organized modest. Above the television, she
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: kept a shelf of snow globes, small souvenir pieces she
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: had collected over the years, each one a little sealed
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: world she could hold in her palm. Friends said she
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: liked the way they turned ordinary places into something quiet
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: and permanent. She had never been to Seattle. Tracy had
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: ended a two year relationship sometime in the months before
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: the fire. Her finances were stable. She had no known enemies,
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: no debts that anyone could find, no reason for anyone
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: to wish her harm. Her closest friend was a coworker
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: named Barbara Finch, and the two spoke most days, sometimes
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: on their lunch break, sometimes in the evening. After work.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: Tracy had a morning routine that Barbara knew by heart.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: Every day, Tracy walked two miles along the Marrow River
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: to a green bench near the water. She would sit
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: there long enough to watch the geese then walk back.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: It was the kind of ritual that belongs to someone
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: who has built a life they actually enjoy living. On Friday,
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: November ninth, two thousand one, Tracy declined an invitation to
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: a friend's birthday gathering that evening. She stayed home instead.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: That afternoon, she called Barbara. Tracy was not frightened. She
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: was irritated. There had been a utility truck parked outside
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: her duplex since early morning, and the driver had been
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: on and off the property all day without any clear explanation.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: She described him young, heavy set, with a noticeable scar
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: on the back of his right hand. She had written
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: the contractor's name down on a note pad. She told
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: Barbara she was going to follow up about it. That
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: notepad was never recovered. At eleven forty seven that night,
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: a call came in to the Marrow Falls Fire Department.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: The lower unit of the Emerson Street duplex was fully involved.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: By the time the first crew arrived. Fire fighters found
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: Tracy in the hallway near the rear bedroom. She had
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: not made it out. The cause of death was smoke inhalation.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Eleven days later, an investigator signed the ruling accidental an
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: unattended candle near a curtain case closed. Barbara Finch kept
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: thinking about that phone call, about the truck, about the
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: scar on the driver's hand. But the case was closed,
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: and the ruling was official, and eventually the only thing
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: left to hold on to was the explanation. The record
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: gave that Tracy had simply left a candle burning in
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: the wrong place at the wrong time. For twenty two years,
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: that was the story. Then a volunteer reached into a
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: storage box and a church on Faber Industrial Drive, and
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: the story cracked open. Gregory Hunt was sixty one years old,
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: a retired phone company employee who volunteered on Saturday mornings
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: at Calvary Ridge Lutheran. On November fourteenth, two thousand twenty three,
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: he was sorting donated coats in storage Unit forty seven
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: on Faber Industrial Drive when his hand closed around something
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: small and hard inside a cardboard box, a snow globe
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: seattle space needle about four inches tall. He almost set
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: it asid, then he turned it over on the underside
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: a strip of masking tape written in ink. Tracy Mills No.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: Two thousand one, Labola Denive No. Tania Holline, no Tania Oheen,
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: no smoke damage, no heat crazing on the glass. Whatever
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: had happened on Emerson Street twenty two years earlier, this
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: object had not been in that fire. It had been
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: removed before the fire or after, but either way it
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: had been kept, and then at some point it had
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: been given away to a church that had no connection
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: to Tracy Mills whatsoever. Hunt brought it to a pastor.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: The pastor called the Morrow Falls Non emergency line, and
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: a routine intake log eventually crossed the desk of Gina Osborne,
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: a state fire Marshal investigator out of Columbus who had
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: been assigned to a completely unrelated commercial review in the county.
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: Osbourne almost missed it. She very nearly did, but she
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: recognized the address. Osborne pulled the two thousand and one file.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: What she found inside it was not a solved case.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: It was a case that had stopped asking questions. The
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: archived brize samples from the Emerson Street living room had
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: been cataloged correctly. They were still there, sealed, properly labeled,
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: but they had never been submitted for full chemical screening
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: when Osborne sent them to the State Lab in late
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: October twenty twenty three. The results came back within two weeks.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: Petroleum distillate two separate locations on the living room floor.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: Both locations were inconsistent with the position of any candle
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: in the room. That ruling accidental unattended candle had been
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: built on a foundation that no one had tested. Osborne
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: then pulled the incident log for Engine Company Company, the
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: suppression crew that had responded as part of the second
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: wave to Emerson Street. There was an anomaly. Engine Company
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: had staged from Kettle Road, four miles from the duplex,
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: at eleven forty pm, forty seven minutes before the alarm
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: at eleven forty seven pm. A crew does not stage
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: at a location four miles from a fire before the
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: fire is reported. There is no protocol for that. There
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: is no explanation in the log. Osborne's subpoenaed employment records
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: and vehicle records for every member of Engine Company's roster
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: from November ninth, two thousand one, One name surfaced with
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: a thread attached to it. Philip Zimmerman, twenty nine years
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: old at the time of the fire, three years with
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: Maril Falls Engine Company Company, two vehicle repair orders came
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: back in the records a wheel bearing job completed November seventh,
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: two thousand one, on a van registered to Zimmerman's cousin.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: The van had broken down on Kettel Road on d
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: November eighth, the night before the fire, and had been
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: left there overnight. Zimmerman would have had reason to return
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: to that road the following night to retrieve it. He
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: had his radio, he would have heard the alarm the
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: moment it went out. He was already positioned. Osborne then
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: located Herbert Cross, Tracy's neighbor. Cross was eighty six years
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: old in twenty twenty three and had been hospitalized during
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: the original investigation. No one had ever interviewed him. He had, however,
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: kept a handwritten log of everything he observed from his
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: window on the day of November ninth, two thousand and one.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: The log included a truck number. That number traced back
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: to the same cousin's van, And then there was the scar.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: Tracy had described the driver to Barbara Young heavy set
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: a noticeable scar on the back of his right hand.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: A two thousand four workers compensation filing for Philip Zimmerman
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: documented a scar on the back of his right hand.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: The filing described it as the result of a kitchen
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: accident in his teens. Three threads, the staging, the van,
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: the scar. None of them alone was enough, but they
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: did not exist alone. When investigators brought Zimmermann in for
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: questioning in late November twenty twenty three, he said something
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: that no one expected. He admitted going inside the duplex.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: He said he had known Tracy. He said that when
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: the crew reached Emerson Street before suppression was fully established,
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: he had entered the building and removed a small object.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: He said he wanted to preserve something of hers. That
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: admission opened a door he could not close again because
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: Raymond Cosel had been the first fire fighter through the
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: front door on Emerson Street that night. Kozel was a
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: retired firefighter now seventy one years old, diagnosed with esophageal
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: cancer in August twenty twenty three. He had said nothing
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: about what he saw for twenty two years. When inves
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: instigators reached him in November, he was in hospice care.
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: Kozel told them what he had seen. Zimmerman al already
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: inside the burning building before suppression, holding something small, moving
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: it into his coat pocket. Cozel had watched it happen
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: and had said nothing. He died on December twenty ninth,
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: twenty twenty three, twenty five days after the arrest. Picture
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: the reconstruction. Now, if the fire started with an unattended candle,
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: the accelerant pattern at two living room locations makes no sense.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: If someone carried petroleum distillate into that apartment and set
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: two ignition points, those locations make perfect sense. If Zimmerman
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: was already on Kettle Road with his radio and a
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: reason to be there, he would have known the moment.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: The moment the alarm sounded, he could have reached Emerson
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: Street with engine company, entered a head of suppression, and
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: retrieved the one object he had left behind, the object
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: that bore a name and a date. But here is
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: the thing the reconstruction forces into the light. Tracy had
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: told Barbara she planned to follow up about the contractor
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: the next week. She was not supposed to be home
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: that night. She had declined the birthday gathering. But there
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: was no way for any one watching the duplex from
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: the outside to know that the fire was directed at
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: the building. Evidence connecting it to the landlord, Earl Petch,
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: who held a documented civil judgment against Zimmerman from a
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: separate rental dispute pointed toward a motive grounded in economic retaliation,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: not personal grievance against Tracy. Tracy was not the target
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: of an elaborate personal scheme. According to the evidence, she
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: was home when she was not expected to be. Two
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: prior fires in two thousand eight and two thousand thirteen
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: at properties owned by people with documented financial disputes with
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: Zimmerman had both been ruled accidental, no deaths, no further investigation.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: In twenty twenty three, both were reconsidered. Zimmerman was ultimately
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: convicted on two additional felony arson pounds connected to those fires.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: The snow globe on Gregory Hunt's work table on Faber
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: Industrial Drive was the thing that cracked it open, not
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: because it proved anything by itself, but because a retired
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: phone company employee thought it was strange that a globe
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: bearing a dead woman's name had ended up in a
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: box of donated coats at a church she had never attended,
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: and because he made one phone call, and because that
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: call landed on Gina Osborne's desk, and Osborne recognized an
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: address she had seen before. Philip Zimmerman was arrested on
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: December fourth, twenty twenty three, guilty aggravated murder, guilty, aggravated arson,
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: guilty two counts of felony arson for the prior fires,
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: life without possibility of parole. The snow globe was logged
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: as evidence. When the case closed, it was released to
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: Christine Mills, Tracy's sister in Dayton. Christine placed it on
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: a shelf. Christine set the snow globe on a shelf
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: That single fact deserves a moment. For twenty two years,
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: she had understood her sister's death as the consequence of
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: a candle left too close to a curtain, an accident,
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: a careless, ordinary accident that took someone careful and organized
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: and alive. And then, in the span of one autumn,
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: that understanding was dismantled, piece by piece. The archived debris
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: samples Herbert Cross's log book, Raymond Cosel's account from a
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: hospital bed, a Seattle souvenir in a box of donated coats,
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: until what remained was not an accident at all. It
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: was a conviction. Philip Zimmermann stands guilty of aggravated murder,
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: aggravated arson, and two additional counts of felony arson for
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: the fires in two thousand and eight and two thousand
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: five thirteen. He will spend the rest of his life
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: in an Ohio correctional facility. At the time of his arrest,
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: he was fifty one years old and inspecting fire suppression
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: systems for a living. The record does not explain whether
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: the people who hired him knew his history. The record
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: does not need to. Raymond Kusel, the fire fighter who
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: had carried the weight of what he saw in that
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: hallway for twenty two years, died on December twenty ninth,
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: twenty twenty three. He was twenty five days past Zimmerman's arrest.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: Whether that timing brought him peace is not something the
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: case file can answer. What it can confirm is that
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: he spoke before he died. That matters. It does not
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: undo the silence, but it matters. The civil judgment that
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: Earl Petch had carried against Zimmerman from a separate rental
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: dispute years before Emerson Street never made it into the
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: two thousand and one investigation. It was not hidden, It
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: was simply not found because no one was looking for
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: a connection between a fire fighter and a landlord when
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: the ruling was already accidental. That gap between what the
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: evidence contained and what the investigation reached for is what
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: gave Zimmerman twenty two years. The archived debris samples had
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: sat in catalog storage since two thousand one Petroleum distill
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: it at two living room locations, inconsistent with the position
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: of the candle, inconsistent with any accidental ignition scenario, sitting
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: in properly labeled containers waiting for some one to run
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: a full chemical screen. No one had ordered one, not
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: because the samples were lost, because the case was closed.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: Herbert Cross kept his log book a neighbor hospitalized during
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: the original investigation who sat at his window and wrote
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: down a truck number, because that is what Herbert Cross did.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: He kept records. He was eighty six years old in
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: twenty twenty three and still had the note book. The
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: number traced to a van belonging to Zimmerman's cousin, Barbara Finch,
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: had a description of the driver, Young Heavy set a
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: scar on the back of his right hand because Tracy
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: called her that afternoon. Tracy was upset, not frightened, upset.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: The man had been parked outside since morning. Tracy wrote
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: the contractor's name on a notepad. That notepad was never recovered,
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: but Barbara's memory held, and Zimmerman's worker's compensation filing from
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: two thousand four documented the scar Tracy's name on a
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: strip of masking tape under a snow globe. A sixty
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: one year old phone company retirey sorting donated coats in
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: storage unit forty seven. A state fire investigator who recognized
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: an address three things twenty two years apart from the fire,
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: pointing back to the same hallway on Emerson Street. The
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: case of date of Ohio versus Philip Zimmerman is closed.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: Tracy Mills walked two miles every morning to a green
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: bench beside the Morrow River. She watched the geese. She
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: collected snow globes, small sealed worlds, each one holding a
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: skyline or monument under a permanent snow that never settled.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: She was thirty eight years old and worked as a
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: dental hygienist and had recently come out of a two
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: year relationship and had declined a birthday gathering the night
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: of November ninth, two thousand one. That last decision, staying
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: home instead of going out, is the only reason she
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: was in the building when Zimmerman lit it. There is
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: something in this case that does not let go easily,
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: not the fire and not the verdict. It is the
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: image of Christine Mills in twenty twenty three, learning for
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: the first time that the candle explanation was wrong, that
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: her sister did not die because of carelessness, that someone
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: chose it. The investigation failed Tracy twice, Tracy twice, once
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: by closing too fast in two thousand and one, and
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: again by leaving two decades of silence undisturbed. What finally
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: broke through was not a technological breakthrough or a cold
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: case task force. It was a retired volunteer wondering why
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: a dead woman's name was on a snow globe in
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: a box of coats. Twenty two years is a long
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: time to live with the wrong story about how someone
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: you loved died. Christine Mills spent all of it believing
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: an accident took her sister. The record shows she received
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: the snow globe after the evidence was released. She placed
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: it on a shelf. Tracy never traveled to Seattle. The
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: globe with the Seattle space needle was not hers to
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: begin with, but it carried her name, and in the end,
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: it carried her case across two decades and back into
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: a court room. Small sealed worlds. The snow inside never settles,
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: but sometime what is sealed inside them does not stay buried.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: This show is made by Obomedia.