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Sword and Scale contains adult themes and violence and is not intended for all audiences.
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Listener discretion is advised. She was literally burnt alive. There was not much left of her body.
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If you support independent media such as podcasts like this one, head on over to swordandscale.com and consider joining Plus and help keep us alive.
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This is Season 12, Episode 289 of Sword and Scale, a show that reveals that the worst monsters are real.
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When you join PLUS, starting at just $10 a month, you get commercial-free early access to a whole ton of extra stuff.
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just go check it out swordandscale.com or download our app on Android or iOS this show was written
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and produced by Mish Barber Way The End It's a cold January morning in Buffalo, New York.
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The sky is black and clear. The kind of stillness that feels a little unnatural.
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A little unsettling. Like the city itself is holding its breath. Moonlight casts long shadows across the snowy streets.
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Not even the wind stirs. Nothing moves in this cold snap except a faint curl of smoke rising in the distance.
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A warning no one has noticed yet. At the local fire station, Fire Marshal Paul Simonian cradles another mug of coffee,
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hunched over his desk, passing the time with paperwork. Then the call comes in. A fire on the east side.
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Within seconds, his team is pulling on their gear, boots, slamming against the concrete.
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The fire engine roars to life as they tear through the frozen streets towards the house on fire.
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So they get there, pitch black, the room's full of smoke. You see a little glow on the floor and they say we have no fire on the first floor.
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We're in the second floor. We see some rubbish, maybe a pile of clothes burning in the center of the room.
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Paul listens to the radio. It seems like your typical house fire. His men are on it.
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He turns back to his work, keeping an ear on dispatch. Shortly after, the lieutenant called back, said, no, it's not rubbish. We have a victim up here. We have a fatality.
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Paul suits up, gets in his vehicle, and speeds towards the fire. En route, I get to the fire scene. I go up to the incident command, ask him what's going on.
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He says there's some occupants that are across the street at a neighbor's house, some brothers and a mom.
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I go, okay. The victim's family made it out. Now they huddle inside a neighbor's house away from the biting cold.
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But inside, 28-year-old Elizabeth Bell is dead. Thick smoke curls from the top windows of the little house twisting into the night like something alive.
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Red and blue lights slash across the neighbors' windows, shaking the street awake.
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Neighbors step cautiously onto their porches, drawn by the unmistakable pull of disaster.
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Only minutes before, firefighters were barking orders, hauling hoses, and attacking the inferno on the second floor.
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But now the fire is out, and the smoke is settled. So when Paul arrives, he takes a breath, steadying himself.
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Then he steps inside. Go in the front door. There's no visible fire at all down on the first floor.
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I go to the back of the house where the stairs are. I just start seeing some smoke smudge down the stairs and some fire debris.
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I meet the lieutenant up there. He takes me and shows me where Elizabeth is. She's in the back room of the house.
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There's some big aquariums on the side with some reptiles in it. There's fire damage in there, like ceiling heat damage and things like that.
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Our fire crews did their overhauling, which ripped down the ceilings and the walls and looking in the channels to make sure there's no more fire.
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Then we proceed to the front of the house, and there's a small little room on the left.
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There was a little girl's bed in there, like a Hello Kitty bed or something like that.
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But the little girl's room wasn't the place where the fire originated. So Paul moved over to Elizabeth's bedroom.
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And then I went in Elizabeth's bedroom, and you could see the mattress was burned pretty good on a third of it.
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Maybe it was a big mattress, maybe a king-size mattress. Burned into the box spring a little bit.
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There was some fire damage in there more heat damage The fire started on Elizabeth bed The mattress was burned into the box spring black and charred
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Coiled springs flinging upwards like a broken jack-in-the-box. The fire on her mattress was still petering out.
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The ceiling was down. Some of the walls were torn down. And I happened to just look, you know, I was just looking across the room seeing what's going on.
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I look for candles. I'm looking for smoking, overloaded extension cords, anything like that.
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And I see a piece of drywall that's broken down, and something's dripping on it, but it's leaving a sheen, like a rainbow sheen.
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The oily rainbow sheen made Paul do a double take. He stepped closer. He knew what that was.
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He just couldn't believe it. And there's a little juice bottle that's tipped over and it's dripping.
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And I take a smell of that and I notice it's gasoline. It smells like gasoline, like an accelerant.
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My flag goes up. I go, well, we probably have a crime scene here. I go back out with the lieutenant.
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I said, stop the overhauling. Don't rip anything else down anywhere. Don't touch Elizabeth.
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Paul knew that spray of gasoline on Elizabeth's wall was the beginning of their story.
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Now he had to find out what the rest of it was. This looked like the aftermath of a terrible accident or a desperate attempt to end it all.
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The Buffalo Police Department was called onto the scene. Paul racked his brain to figure out what had happened to Elizabeth.
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It was also strange and unsettling because Elizabeth lay splayed on the floor where she died wearing only a bra.
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The fabric fused to what was left of her. She had clearly been sleeping when the fire started,
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and it didn't start around her, it started on her. Her stomach had been the source,
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and it was charred beyond anything human. From her knees to her belly, you know, all in there,
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her groin, her thighs, all that area. Not her face, her upper body. So it was all right there.
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It was a grisly sight, something you should probably never see in your lifetime.
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Elizabeth had hollowed out in the middle. Her stomach was like the pit of a campfire.
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It's very disturbing because some of the area is red, some is black. It's just burned like you burn food.
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But Elizabeth was burned in some areas to the bone. I could see her thigh. Paul and the investigators went across the street to talk to Elizabeth's family.
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The house was rented by Elizabeth's mother, who lived there, along with Elizabeth, her young daughter, and Elizabeth's brother.
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When Paul and the investigators spoke with Elizabeth's brother, he told them how everything started that night.
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Then it kind of started really taking a twist that her boyfriend came over, some yelling going on back and forth.
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Elizabeth's newly estranged boyfriend, Frank Brett Jr., had showed up at the house in the middle of the night.
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Elizabeth's brother said he came in and walked straight up to her bedroom. Her brother heard some yelling and then an earth-shattering boom.
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And the one brother said he heard Frank come down the back stairs very fast and he opened up his bedroom door, went into the kitchen, and he saw Frank on fire.
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And they were trying to put him out, and he told the brother, go upstairs, help your sister.
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And he ran out the back door. Frank fled the house on fire, leaving Elizabeth burning in her bedroom
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and the horrid smell of smoke billowing behind him. This is former Buffalo District Attorney John Flynn.
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He took off out of the house, went to the backyard, jumped a fence, and then ran down the backyards to another street.
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And he broke into a house on Leroy Street and hid in a closet. The flames were still clinging to Frank as he ran like a madman, peeling off his burning clothes and throwing them behind him in the snow.
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He made it down to the street before breaking into the first unlocked house he could find.
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He's now hiding in the closet of this house that he broke into. A little girl who lived in that house wakes up mommy and daddy in their bedroom and says,
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mommy and daddy, someone's in the house. Now, put yourself in that situation, okay?
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I got five kids, all right? If one of my kids did that, I'd be like, no, honey, you're dreaming.
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You had a bad dream. Go back to bed. And that's exactly what dad did here. Well, mom now who's lying in bed says, Hmm, I think I smell something. You know, mom and dad, you know, are kind of up in the bed now and they're kind of sniffing now. And mom's like, yeah, I smell something. And so dad gets up. What he's smelling is burnt flesh. Unbelievable.
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The unmistakable smell wafting from the closet had given Frank away. Dad follows the smell of burnt flesh into this closet and opens the closet door.
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He now grabs this guy, takes him out of the closet, takes him out of the house, and throws him outside on the front lawn.
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But at the same time police officers from the scene at Elizabeth house had noticed Frank trail in the snow and started following it Blood on fence posts and climbing over the fence We see clothing They find a burned jacket
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behind a bush. They're tracking this person in the snow, the blood trail in the snow, the clothing,
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climbing fences, broken picket fences. And then they get a call, the police get a call of somebody
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in a man's house around the corner. Frank lay in the snow on the front lawn, his raw red flesh exposed to the elements.
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It was a mess of soot and blood. But unlike Elizabeth, he was alive. Three different people in the neighborhood now
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have called 911. And police, fire, first responders, everyone's coming to the neighborhood.
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and as you can imagine, there is a blood trail of him running from these backyards
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all the way down to where this house was. Again, unbelievable. It was unbelievable.
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What had started as a routine house fire had spiraled into chaos on the east side of Buffalo.
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Flames, smoke, an injured child, and then something far worse. A dead woman who looked like she'd been burned alive.
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Frank was burned badly, too. Unrecognizable, actually. But he was breathing. And for investigators, that meant one thing.
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If he survived, he might be the only one who could explain what really happened inside that house.
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But by the time that he could speak, a story would already be taking shape. one where investigators wondered if the fire started in Elizabeth's hands or his.
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Twenty-seven-year-old Elizabeth Bell had been burned alive in her east side home in Buffalo, New York.
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What started as a routine house fire quickly turned into a potential homicide investigation
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when firefighters discovered that Elizabeth was the source of the inferno. Even more shocking, her former boyfriend, Frank Brett Jr., had also gone up in flames.
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He fled the scene burning alive only to be caught after breaking into a stranger's home,
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his scorched flesh giving him away. Elizabeth was pronounced dead at the scene. Fire Marshal Paul Simonian hypothesized that gasoline had been thrown on her torso and ignited.
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Elizabeth had stumbled and crawled away from her bed into the hallway where she passed out and perished.
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During the chaos, Elizabeth's child had run too, burning only the bottoms of her feet as she escaped downstairs,
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out the front door with the other members of the house. No one else had been hurt in the fire except Elizabeth and Frank.
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And the police were zeroing in on Frank. After all, innocent people don't run and hide.
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But Frank had been taken to the hospital, not a holding cell. He was, like I said before, severely burned, like almost dead burned.
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I suspect that you and your listeners have heard in the past degrees of burns, first degree, second degree, third degree.
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They don't really use degrees anymore. I mean, some people do, but what they use now is the terms superficial, partial thickness and full thickness.
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A superficial burn is painful but tolerable. You've probably suffered quite a few in your lifetime.
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Think of a really bad sunburn or that fleshy little lump you get when you touch a hot pan.
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Partial thickness burns are more severe and injure deeper layers of skin called the dermis.
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This burn will take weeks to heal and is the most painful because no damage has been done to the nerves.
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This kind of burn is pretty agonizing. But a full thickness burn destroys most of the dermis,
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getting right down to the muscle and bone. The burn part of the body is left with a waxy white appearance.
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It's completely terrifying. A full thickness burn destroys most of the nerves. There's no blister because the burn has gone so deep
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It's plowed through all that flesh, blood, and muscle. He had full thickness of burns throughout his body.
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He had to have a cadaver skin graft done of his face. He lost all of his fingers.
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They actually had to put him in an induced coma to actually do the skin graft of his face,
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and they had to graft on new eyelids on his eyes. To say he was jacked up is an understatement of the century.
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Frank was a mummified version of the man he once was. Just a day before, he'd been a handsome, healthy, 33-year-old man.
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now he was a monster burned on 90 of his body with stubs for hands and ears that melted into the side of his head
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His lips looked like two banana slugs resting on an old leather mask. He would never be the same again.
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Karma's got a funny way of working. It really does. It can be quite efficient, too.
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There was no way he was leaving the hospital. He was not a flight risk. So there was no rush to arrest him, to keep him in jail. He wasn't going anywhere. So in this case, we made the decision to not arrest him right away and to just work up our case, do the investigation, and then put it in the grand jury.
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Paul Simonian, the head fire marshal at the time, was already piecing together what had happened based on the evidence.
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You learn not to just rush to a snap judgment because so many things could happen.
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You know, you don't know the players. You don't know what actually transpired in that bedroom, who did what, who said what.
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I said, you got gasoline up here. That doesn't belong up here. So something's wrong there.
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You have a boyfriend that ran out. They were both on fire. He didn't stay or try to help her.
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He ran out. How badly is he burned? This is way before we have any information about Frank, any threats he's made in the past or history with Elizabeth.
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Frank may have been incapacitated, but Elizabeth's family was unharmed, and they knew far too much about the couple.
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That 1,300-square-foot yellow house in Buffalo wasn't just a home. It was a tight-knit world where no secret stayed hidden, especially between Elizabeth and Frank.
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Elizabeth Bell was unconventional and eccentric. She was bold, passionate, and impossible to ignore.
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She had a deep love for animals, working at a veterinary clinic and filling her home with strays in need of care.
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Her aquarium teamed with reptiles, and a cage of ferrets rattled with energy. Each one adored.
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Her bedroom was like a zoo. In her early 20s, she had a daughter from a previous marriage, and was raising her with the help of her mother.
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She was the kind of woman who dyed her hair every color of the rainbow. You know the type. You probably are the type, judging by our demographics data.
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Anyway, she thrived in Buffalo's alternative scene where music, misfits, and mayhem collided.
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That's where she met Frank, a fixture in their tight-knit friend group. They'd known each other for years, but in 2017, their friendship turned into something more.
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He had actually moved in with her into her mom's house and was living there in the fall of 2017.
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Frank was working in construction, doing odd jobs when he could. He was just as wild to look at as Elizabeth with his long-dyed red beard and alternative clothing.
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Think punk rock meets medieval tavern vibes with a dash of white guy with dreadlocks.
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That's the phenotype we're working with here. But he was charismatic and kind. Even Elizabeth's mother remembered how fond she had always been of Frank.
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He was the type of guy who really locked eyes with whoever he was talking to and made them feel like they were the center of the universe.
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He had a way about him that was inviting. When he wanted it to be, that is. Elizabeth and Frank were both intense type people.
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She wielded words like weapons, and he never backed down either. What had started as a blissful relationship full of fun and excitement
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quickly turned into toxicity. When Frank moved in, things slowly got worse. It was like he'd lost all his charismatic power being in their home.
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The personality he'd put forth to impress people was washed away by tight living quarters.
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The real Frank started to show. That fall, Elizabeth's family all had to listen to the couple's fights getting worse.
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They would be screaming at each other well into the night. Two hard-headed, passionate people both unwilling to give in.
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By December, it was all over. Their relationship hadn't even lasted a year before Elizabeth told Frank to get out.
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He didn't go quietly either. On his way out, he put his fist through a window. And he moved out.
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And again now, this homicide occurred on January 11th. So he moves out now in December, approximately a month before the homicide.
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And the breakup was not smooth. It was a very contentious breakup. Frank packed up his things and left in a huff to stay with his mom, who wasn't too far away.
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Though they had separated, Elizabeth and Frank continued their fighting. That month from December to January was extremely contentious.
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Contentious, you know, text messages going back and forth between the two of them.
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Through the safety of their cell phones, they argued about bills one party didn't pay, stuff they needed back from each other, you know, that kind of stuff.
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They hurled insults at one another like petty children via text. He took it over the top was a bike that he had, that he left there.
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Frank's main way of getting around town was on his beloved bike. But this wasn't just any old mountain bike.
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He'd rigged it up to what he really fancied, a real special machine. And he put some kind of a fancy engine on the bike.
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So he turned the bike into kind of like, you know, a motorbike, all right? And so he had this like souped up bike that he left there. Elizabeth apparently put the bike to the curb, to the trash, and either someone picked the bike up or the garbage man did and threw it away.
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In an irritated rage one afternoon, Elizabeth threw Frank's bike on the curb along with his tools,
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the tools that his father had given him. She took a photograph of the pile and texted it to Frank.
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The bottom line is that he lost his bike, and he believed that she threw it away, and he was livid.
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At that point, there were text messages going back and forth where he basically threatened to kill her.
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Um, he threatened to burn her, like literally said, I'm going to burn you and your whole fat effing family.
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After the threat, Elizabeth wrote to Frank. Someone already thought your bike was trash.
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I'll bring everything else inside. Please don't burn our fat selves down. Good thing I paid for that bike.
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No love lost. He responded, not a joke. He also made threatening remarks to his boss.
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So, Frank was kind of a handyman, laborer, construction kind of guy. He worked for this one guy who became a witness at trial.
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He basically told his boss that, hey, I'm going to pay her back for what she did, or I'm going to get her.
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Words to that effect. Frank had lost his mind. That bike had pushed him to the point of no return.
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Elizabeth and Frank were so innately intense that when it was good, it was euphoric.
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But when it was bad, it was World War III. And when she finally kicked him out, Frank had nowhere to put the wreckage of his emotions.
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He didn't process it. He didn't grieve. He just flipped the switch. the love and passion he once felt for her all curdled into pure undiluted hate the early morning
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hours of uh january 11th of 2018 he uh he got on a bike okay kind of ironic that he used a bike
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to go do the murder scene. You can say that again. He did not break in. The door was open,
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apparently, at three o'clock in the morning. The adult brother who lived there was still up,
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and he saw him come in, and he didn't think anything of it because, you know, he had lived
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there up until a month ago. He was kind of coming in and coming out, you know, and he was still
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around, apparently. Elizabeth's brother wasn't privy to all the intense drama between her and
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Frank. That was going on between the two of them via texts and social media. So he watched Frank
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walk upstairs and said nothing. He had with him a satchel, and in the satchel, he had like charcoal
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briquettes, you know, like charcoal used on a grill. And he had lighter fluid, he had a lighter,
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and he also had a Hawaiian punch container filled with gasoline. Frank went quietly into the room
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that he used to share. He found Elizabeth asleep in her bed, and he undid his satchel.
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She was asleep or perhaps passed out in the bed. Now, I say passed out because when the autopsy was done, there was a significant amount of alcohol in her system.
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Alcohol knocks you into a heavy sleep. It's like a sleep so deep you wouldn't notice being moved,
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let alone someone dripping liquid onto your skin. He took his Hawaiian punch bottle that he had with gasoline,
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and he dumped it on her. In the room, all over the bed, on the floor, and some might have got on him, but there's fumes now in that room.
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That whole room is like a little bomb. Frank stood over a sleeping Elizabeth. His anger simmered as he emptied the juice bottle, gasoline soaking into the sheets.
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But like Paul said, the real danger wasn't just the liquid. It was the fumes seeping into every inch of that tiny bedroom, turning the air itself into a weapon.
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When he took his lighter out to light her on fire, the whole room blew up. When that ignition happens and you're surrounded in fire, it's immediate.
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It's like a flashover. Whatever he's wearing is on fire now, too. It happened in an instant.
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Flames roared to life engulfing Elizabeth as her screams shattered the air Fire and smoke swallowed the room Then Frank felt the searing pain
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His own skin was burning. He didn't realize that that was going to flash on him.
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Gasoline is so volatile, and the fumes, it's the fumes that burn and flash, and then the gasoline just keeps fueling the fire and the fumes.
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That's what's burning, is the fumes, not the liquid. Because the gasoline had been poured on Elizabeth, she was on fire.
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She stumbled out of her room grasping at anything to help put her out. But it was useless.
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The second floor was filled with black smoke and she couldn't breathe or see. She couldn't stop the fire that was taking her life away.
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Elizabeth has gasoline on her, so that liquid gasoline is still producing fumes.
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So it's like a source. It just kept burning. But Frank was on fire too. And that was not his plan.
00:31:02
He left Elizabeth to burn alive and ran. 10, 12 feet, he made it down the stairs, saw the brother with the commotion, said,
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go help your sister, and he ran out. Elizabeth's brother tried to smother the flames on Frank, but it was useless.
00:31:17
That's when Frank bolted out and broke into the house down the street. Elizabeth's mother tried to get up the stairs to reach her daughter,
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but the smoke in the hallway choked her, the heat driving her back. The fire was too fast, so she had no choice.
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Leaving her daughter behind was agony. But no one could get up those stairs. Elizabeth was left alone to burn.
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she was burnt so bad just awful awful awful way to die burned alive alive when the police found
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frank on the neighbor's lawn he muttered the words motive and opportunity multiple first
00:32:03
responders heard it as police prosecutors and fire investigators placed the case together
00:32:09
they uncovered the how but the why remained a haunting mystery. Fire wasn't just a weapon here.
00:32:17
It was a statement. A slow, agonizing way to make someone suffer. If Frank truly meant to burn the whole fucking fat family down
00:32:27
like he had threatened, why not torch the house? Why make sure Elizabeth was the source?
00:32:34
The brutality of all of this set his crime apart. It's actually really, really unusual for someone to use fire to actually kill another human being.
00:32:46
It's really unusual. I can think of probably two or three examples in my whole career.
00:32:53
And I started working in fire setting over 15 years ago now. This is Professor Teresa Gannon.
00:33:02
She's a forensic psychologist at the University of Kent who specializes in fire setting.
00:33:08
She became interested in arson when she was tasked with analyzing a case involving fire as a weapon.
00:33:15
Everyone presumes that people set deliberate fires or try and harm people with deliberate fires or warn people off or, you know, send a message about their own distress because they're inappropriately interested in fire.
00:33:30
And quickly, I became interested in the fact that some of the people I was coming across in clinical assessment and treatment, they didn't have an inappropriate interest in fire, but they were still using it.
00:33:44
Teresa started looking into deliberate fire setting. It turned out that the field was vastly ignored by the rest of forensic psychology.
00:33:51
The field is probably about 20 years behind other fields of criminal behavior, such as our understanding of sexual offending or violence.
00:34:02
There are well over 200 risk assessment tools for people who've committed violence.
00:34:08
And there are no properly developed risk assessment tools for people who've set deliberate fires.
00:34:16
In fact, that's something I'm currently working on. because Teresa is the go-to specialist when it comes to fire setting.
00:34:23
Years ago, she and three other researchers pioneered the multi-trajectory of adult fire setting theory,
00:34:30
or as it's known in the field, the MTAF. It talks about this theory, the idea of fire setting scripts.
00:34:40
Now, all of us, you and me, have a script about fire. And what that means is it's a cognitive rule that we learn, usually as children, about how and when fire should be used.
00:34:52
With people who set deliberate fires, what we propose is that they have learned an inappropriate fire script.
00:35:01
For example, Teresa once worked with a man who had grown up on a farm. The common practice on the farm was to set fire to any pest or rodent that was destroying the crops.
00:35:11
Later, in adulthood, when his wife became a pest to him, he decided to get rid of her, much in the same way.
00:35:18
But I would argue that some individuals may learn that fire is the best way to instill fear or to punish another person for a supposed wrongdoing.
00:35:32
We don't know what Frank had learned as a child when it came to fire. He was never really given a full psychological evaluation due to his year-long hospital stay.
00:35:43
He also never claimed insanity. When Frank lived at Elizabeth's house, he had an attitude of taking the law into his own hands.
00:35:52
There was that one time when he heard Elizabeth mom talking about him on a private phone call So he tore down the fence he built for her garden What a petty and childish way to handle hearing someone talk behind your back
00:36:07
Teresa says that the biggest misconception about criminals who use fire as a weapon
00:36:12
is that they're obsessed with it, that they love fire. But that's not really true.
00:36:19
At least, that's usually not true. Most people who set fires to cause harm fear it just as much as anyone else.
00:36:26
You show fire to any animal, it will kind of back away. You know what I mean? It's very powerful and evolutionary-wise.
00:36:34
We're kind of programmed to be scared of it. The MTAF theory breaks down fire setters into five distinct personality types.
00:36:44
Frank would fall under the worst one, the multifaceted fire setter. And these are individuals characterized by two kind of prominent factors.
00:36:55
They've got offensive supportive attitudes that support criminal behavior and also inappropriate fire interest.
00:37:02
So they're really interested in fires and they're really pro-criminal behavior. Frank didn't have a criminal record that we know of.
00:37:11
But his responses to things not going his way were unhinged. like when he broke Elizabeth's mom's garden fence or when he shattered the window after being told
00:37:22
to move out he had no control over himself he was just running on raw unchecked emotion his life
00:37:30
wasn't made up of planned actions but only a chain of knee-jerk reactions to the world around him
00:37:36
he was like a toddler and I would argue that the case that you've been talking about
00:37:42
sits somewhere between the multifaceted, the last one I just mentioned, and the grievance subtype,
00:37:49
but maybe doesn't fit them exactly. It shows you the breadth of motivators lying behind fire setting.
00:37:57
Beyond Frank's emotional immaturity, he lacked stability in his personal life. Frank was in his 30s, and he had no family, no career, and no home of his own.
00:38:09
He was in arrested development, living one day at a time and avoiding adult responsibilities like so many do these days.
00:38:21
Not only was Frank vengeful, but he was also stupid. He packed his satchel full of lighters, gasoline, and charcoal briquettes with a loose game plan to murder Elizabeth by setting her on fire.
00:38:36
He didn't know anything about the way fumes worked and ended up blowing himself up, too.
00:38:41
There's a poetic justice to his disfigurement. Somehow there's art here in all the pain and horror.
00:38:51
By the time he was well enough to be discharged from the hospital, District Attorney John Flynn and his team had already received a warrant for his arrest and an indictment from the grand jury.
00:39:03
We then went to the hospital, took a judge with us to the hospital, and we arraigned him in his room in the hospital.
00:39:16
And that's when the legal proceedings started. Frank was facing first-degree murder charges for the intentional death of Elizabeth Bell.
00:39:26
When prosecutors visited his hospital room, they gave him a choice. plead guilty or go to trial.
00:39:35
So he lawyered up, ready to go to court, waste everybody's time and money, I might add.
00:39:42
But according to Frank, everyone had it wrong. Only he knew what had happened in Elizabeth's bedroom that night.
00:39:52
And when he finally spoke, his words would leave everyone stunned. Elizabeth had started the fire.
00:40:28
Elizabeth Bell had burned alive in her East Buffalo home. For a month, she'd been fighting with her ex-boyfriend, Frank Brett Jr., over their breakup.
00:40:45
One afternoon, she took his beloved electric bike and left it on the curb for someone else to take.
00:40:52
She texted Frank a photo of his bike, and he lost his mind. He threatened to burn her whole fucking fat family, quote,
00:41:01
and even told his boss how angry he was that his bike was gone. Frank had packed a satchel of charcoal briquettes, lighter fluid, and gasoline.
00:41:12
Then he went over to Elizabeth's house at 3.30 in the morning. Within minutes, her bedroom exploded.
00:41:20
Elizabeth was burned alive, and Frank escaped death by the skin of his teeth. Speaking of which, there wasn't much left.
00:41:28
After a nearly year-long hospital stay with burns on 90% of his body, Frank was ready for court.
00:41:36
He was a disfigured monster with clubs for hands, melted ears, and a big bald star on his head where his hair used to grow.
00:41:46
But Frank said that he didn't start the fire. Elizabeth did. he claimed that he only went there to talk about the bike she woke up their fight escalated and then she was the one who threw the gasoline on him
00:42:05
She was the one who struck the lighter. It seemed a little, I don't know, bullshitty.
00:42:14
But then Elizabeth's brother said something that cast a dark shadow of doubt on the whole trial.
00:42:21
When the police interviewed the brother, at the end of the brother's statement, the brother made a comment along the lines of, you know, I didn't go upstairs. I didn't see what happened. I didn't see her do it. You know, I don't know what happened. Maybe she lit him on fire.
00:42:44
It was such an odd thing to hear. The possibility of it being true lingered in the air.
00:42:52
The police may have been focused on the wrong person the entire time, trying to convict an innocent victim instead of a cold-hearted killer.
00:43:04
Frank might have been the real victim in all of this. After all, it was Elizabeth's mother who admitted that her daughter had a sharp tongue
00:43:14
and she could say things that would cut you to the bone. There were only two people in the bedroom that night, and one of them was dead.
00:43:23
The other one was facing life in prison. Why the brother would say that, I have no idea.
00:43:29
Not to be disparaging of the brother because he lost his sister. It was traumatic.
00:43:34
So I'm not trying to beat the brother up here, but let's be honest. He sees this guy walk in the house at three o'clock in the morning.
00:43:42
He moved out a month earlier. If I was a brother, I'd be like, what the hell are you doing in my house at three in the morning?
00:43:50
All right. But he didn't think anything of it and let him walk upstairs. You know, so again, I'm not blaming him.
00:43:56
Don't get me wrong. But again, he did make the comment to the police in his interview.
00:44:02
And that comment was what the defense hung their hat on. Frank's trial didn't start until 2023, almost five years after the murder.
00:44:13
And he had acquired very good defense lawyers. They fought hard to create reasonable doubt for the jury.
00:44:21
Frank sat motionless in the courtroom. The jurors tried to focus on the case, but their eyes kept drifting towards his grotesque mutilations and scars.
00:44:33
The defense lawyers made the argument that she was drunk. She had a lot of alcohol in her system.
00:44:42
The defense lawyers said that at trial that she also had drugs in her system, but there was no proof of that at all.
00:44:49
There was proof of alcohol in her system, though, to be fair. And so they made the argument that she got up in a drunken super,
00:44:56
They got into an argument. She dumped the gasoline on him. She lit him on fire. And that's what happened.
00:45:04
Frank's defense not only grossly disparaged Elizabeth by claiming she was on drugs,
00:45:10
but it crumbled against the physical evidence. His DNA was on the Hawaiian punch bottle and the lighter.
00:45:20
And he left the Hawaiian punch bottle in the apartment and the lighter. The lighter was found on the stairs.
00:45:28
There was another detail, too. Besides the threats Frank made telling Elizabeth that he would burn her and her family.
00:45:36
He also texted his mother right before he got to Elizabeth's house that night. He wrote, I love you, Mama, always.
00:45:45
It was ominous, to say the least. He left a trail of blood. he left a trail of burnt flesh and he left a trail of witnesses and all those witnesses
00:46:01
took the stand in court the first responders who all heard frank say motive and opportunity
00:46:08
the neighbor who pulled frank out of his closet elizabeth's brother frank's boss and all the
00:46:17
medical experts who examined her body. Oh yeah, and of course, they had Paul Simonian, the fire
00:46:24
marshal who helped crack the case. I remember when I finished testifying, I walked down. As I walked
00:46:30
out, Elizabeth's mother was in the back pew, and she reached over and grabbed my hand and just said,
00:46:35
thank you. In this case, he admitted he was there. He admitted Elizabeth died. He admitted
00:46:44
that he sent these text messages, okay? He just didn't admit to how it went down in the bedroom,
00:46:52
which again, that's very, very unusual. But it obviously, thank God, didn't work out for him.
00:47:00
Maybe if Frank had pleaded guilty to the obvious, he might have gained some leniency from the judge.
00:47:08
But he stuck to his lie. Forensic psychologist and fire expert Teresa Gannon had some theories as to why.
00:47:17
If you don't want to admit to yourself that you set the fire or committed the crime or whatever,
00:47:23
also, you can lose a significant amount of social support if you do admit that you did do it.
00:47:29
So by remaining in denial, you know, you still get visitors or people still believe you might not have done it.
00:47:35
Whereas as soon as you admit it, of course, you might lose the last remnants of social support that you have.
00:47:41
maybe he was afraid of losing what little love and support he had left in the world
00:47:46
and that is why Frank refused to accept responsibility maybe he was just lying to himself for comfort
00:47:53
telling himself something that he knew deep down wasn't true if he knew admits to this heinous thing, then maybe it wasn't his fault that he's a disfigured monster in prison.
00:48:08
But by denying his own accountability, Frank lost the little shred of dignity he had left.
00:48:16
Now, he's just a pathetic killer. A sick liar. To be honest with you, this really wasn't rocket science.
00:48:26
You know, it wasn't really a tough case to prove. 99 out of 100 homicide trials take a week, maybe two weeks at the most.
00:48:37
OK, so this was a typical homicide trial, took about a week. And the jury was out like three or four hours and came back with a guilty verdict on the intentional murder.
00:48:52
and the judge gave him the max, which was 25 to life. He drew a tough judge. Quite frankly, he drew the best judge in the building from my perspective
00:49:05
because this judge is the hardest judge on criminals. Frank was sent to Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York.
00:49:17
His earliest possible release date is April of 2043. but for now he sits in that prison in his wheelchair wearing a Star of David and Kippa, or yarmulke, claiming he's found religion.
00:49:32
We contemplated reaching out to Frank, but then we decided not to after speaking with John Flynn.
00:49:40
Frank is so obviously guilty that we didn't want to entertain his lies, but another network did,
00:49:47
and we'll just tell you what he claims happened on that very day. Frank says that on the night it all happened,
00:49:56
he and Elizabeth had a brutal fight. She had confided in him about being abused by a friend at the age of eight
00:50:03
and in a moment of cruelty, he told her the abuse was her fault. He wanted to wound her just as she had wounded him
00:50:12
with her words time and time again. he claimed he turned to leave then something hit him over the head the next memory he had was waking up on the floor surrounded by smoke and flames He says he immediately became concerned about Elizabeth daughter and pushed his way into her little bedroom heroically grabbing her from her bed and rushing downstairs to safety
00:50:39
Then he fled. But that's all completely untrue, in case you haven't figured it out.
00:50:46
Elizabeth's mom, her daughter, and her brother all confirmed that things happened the way the prosecution argued it did.
00:50:54
Despite the cold, hard evidence, Frank continues to deny what he did. He continues to believe his own lie.
00:51:05
But we do not. We know what he did. We have brains. He poured gasoline on a 28-year-old mother and burned her alive because she got rid of his bike.
00:51:16
It's nothing but pure evil. Demonic, if you really think about it. No, I didn't feel any satisfaction that he was guilty because it's not a win-win anywhere.
00:51:32
Elizabeth lost her life. Frank is physically, mentally damaged. His freedom's taken away from him.
00:51:41
There was no satisfaction that he was found. I mean, he just had to be held accountable for what he did.
00:51:47
You get to the point where you do something like that, and you're not thinking clearly, obviously.
00:51:52
You're an enraged, psychopathic killer. And I use that word psychopath, you know, not in a medical sense, but in a just a human sense that you are a sick killer.
00:52:09
There are very few smart criminals out there. There are some, but, you know, he wasn't one of them, obviously.
00:52:17
Fire is a force beyond human control. It's ancient, primal, and merciless. Once unleashed, it obeys no one.
00:52:30
Not even the man who strikes the match. Frank thought he was in charge of that fire but like everything else in his life he was wrong Frank actions that night were like a game where he moved blindly reacting instead of thinking never seeing more than one step ahead
00:52:51
Even the contents of his satchel define his stupidity. Charcoal briquettes? I mean, what's your plan? Are you starting a barbecue?
00:53:00
You ever light charcoal briquettes? You know how long it takes to light charcoal briquettes?
00:53:04
What kind of a fucking idiot brings that to a murder scene? To lay them on Elizabeth and start a campfire on her?
00:53:11
I don't know if there's a word in the English language to define how stupid that is.
00:53:16
Maybe he thought he'd use them to start a small fire downstairs, to in fact burn the whole fucking fat family down like he wanted to,
00:53:25
but changed his mind when he saw her brother was still awake. The lighter fluid, the gasoline, that makes sense, I guess.
00:53:33
But I'll never understand why those briquettes were in his bag. Never. The guy must have never started a barbecue in his entire adult life.
00:53:46
Interesting. There's another question that lingers, too. He saw that her brother was awake, and yet Frank went forth with his plan to set Elizabeth on fire.
00:53:58
Just really let that ruminate for a minute. Frank was not afraid of getting caught.
00:54:04
because if he was, he would have turned around at the first sight of a witness. Instead, he just plowed ahead.
00:54:12
And like every other insane choice he's ever made leading up to that fire, his final move was just as short-sighted.
00:54:21
He was a man ruled by unregulated emotion. A creature of impulse rather than intellect.
00:54:31
Rage rather than reason. You know anybody like that? Because there's a lot of people like that around in my day-to-day.
00:54:42
Kind of makes you think, doesn't it? Frank, however, didn't think. He didn't understand that fire wouldn't stay contained,
00:54:51
that it wouldn't follow his orders, that the fumes would turn that little bedroom into a bomb.
00:54:58
He believed he was orchestrating some grand act of revenge over his bike when in reality he was just an idiot igniting the fuse to his own destruction
00:55:11
John Flynn was right. Frank wasn't just a murderer, he was a fool. A man too wrapped up in his own bitterness and failures to see the inevitable consequences
00:55:22
of his own actions. A man who, for all his hatred, ended up punishing himself more than anyone else ever could.
00:55:33
How Shakespearean is that? Elizabeth Bell died in agony. Her final moments spent in a nightmare no human should ever endure.
00:55:44
But at least her pain ended. At least she's free from it. Frank, on the other hand, has to live with the aftermath.
00:55:56
He has to wake up every day with the scars and the missing hands, with the mangled face, living in a reminder of his own stupidity.
00:56:10
The man who thought he was in control, but ended up losing everything. In his final failure, he created a hell on earth just for him.
00:56:25
And it will haunt him for the rest of his life. additional merch from my garage.
00:56:48
So go check it out. It's going to be on deep, deep discount. I need to get rid of it.
00:56:52
Lots of people are shit stuff. Lots of cool stuff. Just go look, go look. It's like super, super, super cheap.
00:56:58
Stay safe. Thank you.