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FIREBUGS GO WILD in CA, NY and WI
“Hang down your head Bill Bailey, hang down your head and cry. Hang down your head Bill Bailey, poor man you’re about to die.” (Or get locked up.) They’re not just lyrics to an old song, the Redding, California, Bill Bailey really does need to hang down his head and be prepared for some prison time. Trying to make points with a lady friend, this BB messed with the electrical outlet behind her refrigerator so that the resulting blaze would appear to be accidental. $150,000 in damages later, he confessed to the friend that he’d sort of “helped” the fire so that she could build a new house with the insurance proceeds … and maybe pay him $2,000 for his contribution. Initially she cooperated, but then thought the better of it and had herself wired to get the goods on her firebug friend. Trial begins in October.
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Claud David “Flip” Folds (as in flip a lighter?), Jeremy James Folds, and Adelbert Cleaveland are each looking at up to 30 years behind bars if convicted of arson and insurance fraud charges for torching a Harwick, NY home to get their sooty hands on a $50,000 fire policy payoff. It took several hours and a total of five fire departments to get the blaze under control and investigators easily found signs of arson.
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What a fine example Dad Brian Adkins set for his son, Tyler Keck, when he offered to pay Kyle Rott (an acquaintance of Tyler’s) ten grand to set fire to his financially strapped Rustic Mill Tavern in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. Rott, being the kind soul that he was, instead agreed to combine gasoline and a lighter (in a really bad way) and do the job for two cartons of cigarettes. What a deal! Eventually the real “deal” went to Keck for his testimony against Rott and his dead old dad.