Published Oct. 2, 2011 12:15 p.m.
By Casey Farrar Sentinel Staff
As she awoke to flames on her bed, Sandra E. Walker tried smothering the fire with her hands before running to her bathroom and filling a coffee pot with water.
But as she returned to douse the blaze, as she would later describe to police, the fire had spread across the bed and the area around it.
Realizing she’d be unable to extinguish the fire, Walker said she ran out of her second-floor apartment, banging on the walls to wake up residents in other apartments in the High Street building.
Steve Hooper/Keene Sentinel
A family of four across the hall — Carl R. Hina, his wife of only three weeks, Lori M. Hina, their 4-month-old daughter, Lillian, and Carl’s 12-year-old daughter, Sara Jean — awoke to the commotion and dressed. But they wouldn’t make it out alive.
At 2:25 a.m., dispatchers from Southwestern N.H. District Fire Mutual Aid in Keene sent fire trucks to the building, located only a few blocks from the fire station. The first truck arrived four minutes later, dispatch records showed.
Firefighters searched the building for survivors, but never reached the Hinas as they navigated through a building quickly filling with an inky haze that cut visibility to zero, fire officials would say.
The family would later be found in a back room in the apartment, killed by smoke inhalation, according to a medical examiner. Cuts found on Carl Hina’s hands indicated they may have tried to escape by breaking a window, officials told The Sentinel in the days following the Jan. 14, 1989, fire.
Within a week of the fire, Walker had recounted her story to police and fire investigators at least five times, according to court documents.
Her statements initially led investigators toward an accidental cause and early reports indicated it may have started when she fell asleep with a lit cigarette.
Later, as witnesses came forward claiming that a former resident of the building had threatened to burn it down and that he bragged about setting the blaze afterward, investigators shifted their focus, and Walker’s statements would be used to bolster their conclusion that the fire was caused by arson.
N.H. State Fire Marshal investigator Thomas R. Norton ultimately ruled that the fire was set to a couch in the room by an open flame.
More than two decades would pass before police charged David B. McLeod, the former resident named as a suspect early on, with four counts of second-degree murder in connection with the fire.
Walker would die of an illness at her Keene home five years before the arrest was made.
But the use of her statements to investigators have become a pivotal point in the case against McLeod, who sits in a Cheshire County jail cell awaiting his trial.
Investigating the fire’s cause
Walker’s account of the night leading up to the 88 High St. fire is laid out in the hundreds of pages of court documents that fill three thick file folders at Cheshire County Superior Court.
Walker, then 41, and her friend, 42-year-old Edward L. Bussieres, had spent the afternoon visiting friends on Court Street and returned to the apartment building on the corner of High and Carroll streets about 3 or 4 p.m., she told police.
The area — dubbed Christmas Tree Corner by local residents because of the apartment building’s red and green paint — was a well-known party spot and Bussieres frequently hosted gatherings in his first-floor apartment. Walker lived on the second floor; down the hall lived Carl Hina, a taxi driver, and his young family.
Walker told police she left Bussieres’ apartment that night between 8 and 9 p.m. to see a friend.
At her friend’s, Walker drank sambuca and got “pretty buzzed,” she told police, admitting in a later interview that she’d been drinking heavily.
A few hours later — sometime between 11 p.m. and midnight — she returned to her apartment, went to bed and woke up to flames, Walker told police.
In a pre-trial hearing this spring, fire experts for the state and defense testified that the accumulated heat in the room from the fire caused all the surfaces in the apartment to ignite simultaneously in a phenomenon known as “flashover.”
Flashover can affect a fire’s burn patterns, which investigators use to help determine the origin and spread of a fire, according to the National Fire Protection Agency’s Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations.
Some witnesses told police after the fire that a hysterical Walker emerged from the building covered in soot, her hair singed. Bussieres described her as confused and told police she mentioned a candle. Wanda Ford, another resident of the building and McLeod’s ex-girlfriend, testified in court in July that Walker was trying to hide because she believed she’d fallen asleep with a cigarette in her hand and started the fire.
In her interviews with investigators the week after the fire, Walker mentioned smoking, saying at first she assumed she’d fallen asleep with a cigarette and later saying she was unsure whether she’d been smoking.
Notably, she didn’t report waking up to thick smoke in the apartment, further leading investigators from the smoldering cigarette theory — which would have taken longer to start and would have caused more smoke than an open flame, according to court documents.
As investigators’ focus shifted to McLeod, who left for Arizona weeks after the fire and eventually married and had two children in California, Walker faded from the public spotlight surrounding the fire.
Decades later, when investigators from the state’s Cold Case Unit reopened the investigation and began re-interviewing witnesses, they learned she’d died in March 2005.
She was 57.
