The Circus Fire (45 page)

When he discussed his dreams and his inner life, Segee could supply vivid details, but when investigators questioned him about things that happened, he turned vague.

Q. How about this fire on Market Street?

A.
That sounds familiar.

Q. How about the Portland Lumber Company?

A.
Yep, it was right down along the pier.

Q. No, it wasn't down along the pier. It was on Hanover Street and

started on Friday night or rather early Saturday morning.
A.
I remember two or three lumberyards around Portland.

Rather than make Segee provide them with details, his interrogators showed him news clippings of fires, then asked if he recognized them as his work. Beyond this obvious prompting, Segee seemed to acquiesce to any suggestion. He confessed to both the Portland and the Providence circus fires. Of the Portland fire, he said, "It's a sort of a blank in my mind, everything was hazy. I can just remember striking a match." The Providence fire he also set during a blackout. He said the fire was "on the flap of a tent but I don't remember where," echoing newspaper accounts of the time, whereas Hickey's investigation—the notes of which were still sealed—placed the large pinhole on the sidewall. Segee said plainclothes detectives questioned him after both incidents, yet neither fire had prompted any investigation.

His references to Hartford were even less convincing.

Q. The big fire at the circus, how did you set it?

A.
I could have set it any number of ways. They had the tents covered with gasoline and oil to keep the rain off. Even the slightest bit of fire would take hold of it very quickly. I don't know why I set it.

His testimony established again and again that Segee did understand what his questioners wanted to hear. He even came to use the psychologist's terms, providing a convenient, knee-jerk trigger for his behavior by saying that he had "unsatisfactory" sexual relations immediately before each fire.

In later sessions he referred to this as "the pattern." ". . . that just came

about under the same pattern." "I know it followed under the pattern." As the questioning went on, the investigators' coaching grew intrusive. At times Segee didn't give the answers they wanted, so they stopped and continued off the record; when they came back, Segee's answer had changed, now fitting in perfectly.

At the very end, fire marshal Callan asked Segee if he had anything else he wanted to tell them.

"I just have silly dreams," Segee answered.

In Hartford, Commissioner Hickey first heard of Segee's newest confessions from Maine's state fire marshal. Ohio had called them. Callan never got back to Hickey as promised. Three days later, another detective from Maine let Connecticut investigators know the Associated Press had details of the confession, including the circus fire and all four murders.

The news broke nationwide that day, June 30th, backed by releases from Callan's office and the Circleville prosecutor. While Callan's statement laid out the facts, "other sources" filled in Segee's psychological background, paraphrasing the doctor's report. The
Columbus Dispatch
even published one of Segee's drawings—an Indian in full headdress.

Hickey flipped. In his own press release he blasted Callan for purposely freezing the state out of the investigation, failing, in his words, "to render us the ordinary courtesies of interstate cooperation."

Callan responded by finally shipping him the thirty-three page investigation report special delivery. It arrived July 3rd. The 4th, Hickey said, "We have not found anything any different from what we already knew. Until such time as we can further study and investigate the stories Segee has told, there is no corroborative evidence to indicate the truth of his statements."

Hickey's investigation seemed limited to the new information, and functioned solely to confirm or deny the stories, treating Segee as an isolated case. If the commissioner ever tied Segee to red-chested Harry Lakin's suspicious behavior at Municipal Hospital (the Portland man from the light gang crying and telling the Red Cross volunteer that he didn't think it was going to be like this and that he didn't know if he could take it but he wasn't going to squeal) or Blanchfield's men from Portland who quit at noon the day of the fire, he left no record of it. Similarly, he never checked exactly what job Segee did with the spotlights.

In Columbus, Callan made a show of ripping Circleville officials for leaking information from the report, but clearly not to placate Hickey. "It is up to the communities in other states to obtain details of Segee's confession of crimes other than the Circleville fires. Now everybody's got the information." So far, Callan said, none of the New England states where Segee confessed crimes nor officials in Hartford had contacted Ohio officials—a flat-out lie. "I am perfectly satisfied Segee is responsible for the fires. I wouldn't want to say whether or not we could prove it in court."

But a
Courant
reporter who got through to Segee found a different story. Of his crimes, he said, "A lot of them have been talked into me until I actually believe I done 'em, but now I doubt whether I done half the stuff. Things I was certain of before, I'm not so certain of anymore." He was personable, smiling and shaking reporters' hands. "My life has been full of bad thoughts, bad breaks and bad dreams," he said. "When you got a bunch of brothers who call you dopey all your life, you'd understand a little bit. Actually I never had a happy day in my life." At his hearing he pleaded guilty on two counts of arson; the court committed him to Lima State Hospital for a sixty-day observation.

July 5 th, Hickey called and caught Callan, hammering him for the leaks and for not giving Connecticut a crack at speaking with Segee. Callan weakly blamed the Circleville prosecutor.

"You have been offering me those excuses since the thing broke six weeks ago," Hickey said.

"I'm not offering anybody any excuses. I don't have to."

"Well, you are still offering them."

"No, I don't, I don't have to offer any."

"Well, I'm sorry then that you don't have to, because you are still doing it."

"Well, I'm not doing it."

"You're doing it," Hickey said, "and I'm surprised to get such treatment from anybody in the country."

"I don't think you were very courteous when you come out with a press release and then tell me if it wasn't for the press release you wouldn't have gotten a report."

"Well, that's the answer, brother," Hickey said. "I stand on what I say and I'm not afraid of it."

Relations between the two departments never thawed. From here on in, Hickey relied on Maine to provide him with information. No Connecticut authority ever spoke with the prisoner.

In mid-July
Life
magazine printed a story on Segee, complete with his drawings and Spencer Torell's shot of the big top in flames. THE STRANGE CASE OF THE CIRCUS ARSONIST, the headline read, convicting Segee in print just as they had Lemandris Ford. They also published his drawings of three of the killings, leaving out only the now discredited Cape Cottage murder.

Segee stayed at Lima State Hospital into the fall on a sixty-day extension. In late October, inside sources said that doctors would find him legally sane. On Halloween, they did.

The new doctor's diagnosis was perfectly consistent with the original one's Freudian approach. "It is the examiner's opinion that this case represents an acute obsessive compulsive neurosis in which sexual relationships call up the conflicts regarding the Oedipus situation and an acute regression into anal sadistic behavior occurs. The only other possibility is that the sexual act is not in itself completely satisfactory unless fire is also involved in which there is a partial sexualization of fire which brings it closer to a perversion, making it classifiable as an impulse neurosis.

"DIAGNOSIS: Obsessive compulsive neurosis: not psychotic, psychopathic, nor mentally deficient."

The new doctor's findings freed the court to sentence Segee. Asked if he had anything to say before the judge ruled, Segee said, "I have never been in trouble before and ask the court to be lenient." He received two terms of two-to-twenty years in Mansfield Reformatory, to run consecutively—the absolute maximum under Ohio law.

After the hearing, the new doctor told reporters that he believed Segee guilty of some of the crimes, based on answers the suspect gave while under the influence of sodium amytal, a so-called truth serum. In late July, after being injected and asked about the circus fire, Segee "became highly emotional. Then he kept crying, 'I didn't kill anybody, I didn't kill anybody.' He kept going back to talk of the terrible dreams he had. It was always in the course of his dreams that he saw the fiery horse which obsessed him. He would call, 'Fiery horse, don't come after me!' over and over."

When questioned about his early life, Segee had showed fear, crying, "Dad, don't beat me! Don't beat me!"

The doctor described Segee's reactions as those of a confused, bewildered person, the suspect finding it difficult to distinguish dreams from reality—this coming from a man who'd just judged him sane.

Hickey said that Connecticut would take no action against Robert Segee. Neither Maine nor New Hampshire charged him either. Hickey gathered all the information he had on the matter and turned it over to the state's attorney, adding a note that Segee's age made this a case for the juvenile court.

Later that month, two Ohio state troopers questioned Segee about an unsolved murder in Scituate, Massachusetts, thinking this might be the Cape Cottage case. Segee said he'd never spent any time in Massachusetts. Segee then stated "that he at no time set a fire, nor has he ever killed anyone.

"During the conversation Segee stated that all the fires and homicides he is accused of committing came about as a result of his telling about his startling dreams and vivid imagination. All the publicity given Segee's case was based upon his dreams rather than on the actual facts told."

Segee told the troopers that he'd been downtown watching the movie
The Four Feathers
with two companions from the light gang when the circus burned. They returned to the grounds by trolley to find the lot roped off. Whitey Versteeg ordered them to wait until a plainclothes officer questioned them, then after they testified, they were released.

None of this rings true.
The Four Feathers
was released in 1939 and was not playing in Hartford that day (though, a story of a young man wrongfully branded a coward, it's an interesting choice of alibi); there were no trolleys in Hartford in 1944; and among the thousands of pages of testimony, there is no record of Segee's or any of his companions' statements.

The troopers spoke with Segee's parents and aunt again. The family said that for years he'd had dreams bordering on hallucinations. They doubted seriously that he'd set any fires or committed a single violent crime. While the dead girl had lived just a few blocks from them in Portsmouth, the night of her murder the aunt had been baby-sitting the Segee children. Robert was asleep in his bed.

As with everything associated with Robert Segee's confessions, little seemed to fit. It didn't matter. He was in jail, and he would stay in jail. The murders were never proven or disproven, and in the case of the Japanese

boy and the Cape Cottage killing, never verified. In 1951, Ohio would deny Segee parole. He ended up serving every day of his four years. In 1954, the psychiatrist at Mansfield Reformatory found Robert Segee to be psychotic, declaring him a paranoid schizophrenic and committing him to the Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

1950-1990

In November of 1950, Edith Ringling suffered a crippling stroke. In December, John Ringling North signed the last settlement check over to Edward Rogin, making the final price tag for the fire just under $4 million. Despite the bitter infighting between the circus and the receiver, together they had honorably paid off all claims. The claimants, by submitting to arbitration in the first place, had shown themselves not to be greedy. Rogin himself fondly recalled one injured woman who wanted only the price of her ticket.

As the decade began, television swept America, cutting into movie attendance and nearly wiping out live entertainment. Now people stayed home weekday nights. In '51, the show played Plainville again, but attendance was down and there was almost no outcry. The state's defense industries were suffering, and the circus, like the fire, seemed to belong to the past. The big railroad shows were dying, and people knew it.