Fires set to hide crime scene often spotlight area instead

Forensic experts say that, contrary to what many criminals think, fire is not the "ultimate destroyer of evidence."

Camp Lejeune Marine Cpl. John Patrick Wimunc, 23, was charged Monday by the Fayetteville Police Department with first-degree murder, first-degree arson and conspiracy to commit first-degree arson.

Authorities allege Wimunc killed his estranged wife, Fort Bragg soldier 2nd Lt. Holley Wimunc, and set fires to crime scenes in two counties to cover the trail - one at the Fayetteville apartment where authorities say the homicide took place and one in a wooded area in Onslow County where authorities say Holley Wimunc's body was disposed.

Bill Meredith, a crime scene investigator with the Onslow County Sheriff's Department for 14 years, said fire is often a criminal's last-ditch, desperate measure to destroy evidence.

"Fire does not completely destroy evidence. It is still there, you just have to look harder," he said.

Meredith said he has lifted fingerprints from burned metal before.

Fire may destroy some physical evidence, but an amateur cannot create a fire strong enough to generate the heat required to completely destroy a human body, Meredith said.

In his 30-plus years as the medical examiner for North Carolina's Southeastern Region, Dr. Charles Garrett, now retired, has seen more than a dozen attempts to burn a human body as means to cover up a homicide - none of them successful.

"It would have taken authorities longer to find that poor girl's body if the ones who killed her would have just left her out in the woods - like the skeleton we did not find for three years in Bear Creek," Garrett said.

Burning a human body is usually a desperate act of someone looking to hide a heinous crime, Garrett said.

"They have a dead body they are trying to get rid of and they are just too damn stupid to dig a hole," he said.

Garrett said the temperatures required to destroy a body cannot be reached by a wood fire.

Onslow County Sheriff Ed Brown said that often a fire set to hide a crime scene actually draws attention to it.

Such was the case with the fire in Sneads Ferry, he said.

A man on a four-wheeler discovered the remains believed to be Holley Wimunc's after seeing the fire authorities say was set to cover her shallow grave, according to 911 recordings released to The Daily News.

Brown said the Wimunc case caused him immediately think of Maria Lauterbach, a pregnant Camp Lejeune Marine whose charred remains and that of her unborn child were discovered in the Half Moon community backyard of a colleague she had previously accused of rape.

But Monday, Brown said he found himself thinking about a 1980 case in which a local woman had her throat slit and fire set to her apartment to hide the crime.

"It did not work too well that time either," Brown said.