Forensic Files - Season 6, Episode 6 - Fire Dot Com - Full Episode | Forensic Files

in 1996 a fire broke out in a rental home in north carolina one child died another was critically injured
to the family the fire was a mystery to investigators it was murder [Music] [Applause]
[Music] [Applause] [Music] tabor city north carolina a small rural sweet potato farming community in the
western part of the state and home to the henson family merry christmas buddy joshua henson and his sister brittany
lived with their mother terry and her boyfriend rodney strickland rodney worked in construction
terry was a homemaker and student on october 19 1996 rodney left to spend the night with his son in fair bluff
about 15 miles away terry's mother bernice came over to the house that night for dinner i was there
when she took brittany and josh upstairs to bed and as they were going upstairs to bed
the last words i heard josh say is i love you because he was just learning to talk
[Music] after bernice left terry plugged in a space heater to heat the home since it was the first cold
night of fall she fell asleep on the sofa in the living room around midnight at 4am terry was awakened by screams
from her children the house was on fire the thick smoke and flames made it impossible to reach the children
the only thing terry could do was call the fire department the police arrived first and an officer
also tried to rescue the children he too was unsuccessful he went kind of past me and got almost to
the top of the stairway and said we can't get in to clear the way terry moved the space
heater at the bottom of the stairs by the time firemen arrived the upstairs was almost entirely in flames
the children were rushed to the hospital both in critical condition it's really hard to recognize her as
brittany she was black from head to toe and they told me when i got there didn't
think she'd make it brittany was fortunate she survived the fire tragically 17 month old joshua did not
they finally came out and said that he didn't make it they did ask me if i wanted to see him
they suggested i didn't but that i could that you know they had to ask and i didn't
you know i really loved him a lot i really loved him like like he was my actual child
i loved him like that [Music] i wanted my baby brother to at least have a long life
he was too young to die when the fire was extinguished local authorities found evidence that the fire
started in the children's bedroom closet at first they thought that brittany might have been playing with matches but
when they looked into terry henson's background they uncovered information which made
them suspect it might have been murder britney henson now eight years old remembers the horrible fire that burned
through her home four years earlier i was burnt all over and i i had died and i was up in heaven and
leave me that's beautiful and the rivers were rainbow baths and bridges and were gold and the houses were made out
of clouds which had the names on top that were people of the people that would own them
i'm special because i had died and i came back alive that's why i think i'm special
her younger brother joshua just 17 months old died in the fire i just miss him alone
i wish he hadn't died i mean he was so young with any kind of house fire officials
try to identify the cause generally a fire burns longest at or near its point of origin
so the room with the most damage is usually where the fire started most of the damage was in joshua's
bedroom which was at the top of the stairs investigators found a v-shaped pattern
on the wall in joshua's bedroom closet it's a pattern that occurs when something combustible is against a wall
this discovery told investigators that the fire started on the closet floor and traveled up to the attic
a melted copper electrical wire was hanging from the attic which investigators concluded had been burned
in the fire and was not the cause of it special agents from the north carolina state bureau of investigation and the
federal bureau of alcohol tobacco and firearms assisted in the investigation they eliminated the nearby electrical
outlet as the cause and when they couldn't determine how the fire started they concluded that someone had set it
intentionally with a match or lighter i was told by the state agent that anyone who was
in that house that night was a suspect anyone who had been in the house that evening would have been
investigators first talked to brittany to see if she had been playing with matches that night they were satisfied
she had not next they wanted to know where terry's boyfriend rodney was at the time of the
fire rodney had plenty of alibis he was back in fair bluff with his son spending the
night plenty of people saw him but investigators were most suspicious of terry since she was sleeping on the
sofa downstairs when the fire broke out instead of in her bedroom upstairs and they also discovered that a few
years earlier she had given three older children up for adoption the only reason terry let those children
go was because she did love them enough to want the best for them and at that time
she could not give them anything not even a home she didn't have a job she didn't have a
car she didn't have no money she'd have anything people made a leap from that event
the adoptions to somehow that becoming a motive for killing her other child witnesses also told police that at the
fire scene terry behaved suspiciously her mama said that she had been depressed so she had been bringing books over for
her to read at night and her boyfriend said that she would sleep on the couch they just didn't think terry was acting
the way a mother would act if their if a child had been killed in a fire there was just something wrong to them about
it she was blamed for the fire she was blamed that she's the one who did the fire
no she didn't do it she didn't do a single thing terry denied having anything to do with
setting the fire i was actually the only one considered they had to eliminate brittany
because she was a child that could have started a fire at that age rodney couldn't be considered because he
wasn't there he was 12-15 miles away police arrested terry henson and charged her with murder attempted murder and
arson and her nightmare continued when her own lawyer hired an independent investigator
who agreed with the prosecution that the fire had been intentionally set i mean it took me a long time to realize
my attorney wasn't going to help me i still held a lot of faith that he was going to do something and
i finally realized okay he's not if convicted terry could face the death penalty
for 61 days terry henson sat in a north carolina jail cell waiting to be tried for murder and arson
eventually terry was released on a 200 000 bond but remained under house arrest and with no one else to turn to
terry conducted her own research into the fire that killed her son joshua first with her computer
she made a search on the internet she typed in the word fire i spent several days probably weeks
looking on the internet for something that would help my case i didn't understand the internet as far
as there being actually people out there that you could talk to i wasn't sure of
how to talk to them if i didn't know it was slow going until terry found an article written by a fire investigator
in sydney australia is it an accidental fire or arson by tony k the article described common mistakes
investigators make when determining the cause of a suspicious fire specifically it discussed the role of
bias in fire investigation for example arson investigators tend to look for arson and insurance investigators tend
to look for insurance fraud the article recommends that fire investigators have a scientific or
chemical background terry desperately wanted to get in touch with the author i didn't understand email when i saw the
little envelope thing on his page i clicked on it and it's you know like a blank page pops up for
you to type in so i just assumed okay well i can send this to him and i still didn't understand how he
would get back to me the author tony cafe did respond but since he lived in australia he
recommended dr gerald hurst in austin texas dr hurst earned his phd in chemistry
from cambridge and he agreed to look into terry's case homeowners burning house down to kill their
children pretty rare very rare terry sent dr hurst every piece of information she had about the fire
after reading through it dr hurst was struck by how incomplete the local investigation had been i
decided to concentrate on the attic precisely because they had said almost nothing about the
attic in the investigation report the attic was a complete revelation the insulation in the attic was made of
ground-up newspaper treated with a flame retardant chemical dr hurst checked local weather
conditions and he discovered that hurricane fran had passed through tabor city north carolina just six weeks
before the fire terry said the torrential rains from that hurricane leaked through the roof
and caused water damage in the ceilings dr hurst also found a melted 50-year-old
electrical wire in the attic insulation terry told hearst there had been some electrical problems on the night of the
fire her curling iron had been going on and off earlier that evening and when she moved the electric space
heater for the firemen she remembers it was cold to the touch i picked that with both hands and just
slid it out of the way and later is when it dawned on me that that heater should have been very hot
and it had been turned on in full blast that meant that the heater had gone off uh at least a half an hour
before she became aware of the fire dr hurst and fire investigator ken gibson flew to north carolina to inspect
terry's home first hand they did not believe the fire started the way the government investigators
said that's really very simple innocent people are being put into prison or forced into plea bargains for fires
they did not start after terry henson was charged with arson and murder in the death of her 17
month old son joshua her only hope was a scientist she found through the internet
jerry hurst is one of these guys who kind of comes out of left field and can actually save the day in this
case the findings of the state bureau of investigation and the bureau of alcohol
tobacco and firearms rested on the theory that the fire started on the floor of the bedroom closet
and when the cause couldn't be found they concluded the fire had been deliberately set
atf they call themselves arson investigators the state call themselves arson investigators that's what they're
looking for is arson that's what they train for that's what they go to school for
is to catch arsonists what you want is a fire investigator to determine what caused the fire
dr hurst found evidence that the roof leaked in terry's rented home and tests revealed it washed away the
flame retardant chemicals on the paper insulation he also found evidence of electrical
on the day of the fire mysteriously terry's curling iron was going on and off and during the fire when terry moved the
space heater it was cold to the touch this indicated the heater had not been on for at least a half hour before the
fire the heater was plugged into a line originally designed for 15 amps in the fuse box was a 30 amp fuse which
had blown out that means that you're carrying more power through that wire than it was
designed to carry and when you overload it it heats it gets hot a cold snap a 1500 watt appliance on a line that
probably never seen that high wattage before and the question became did that electrical line over the top of the
closet feed the heater because if it did you had a correlation you had a potential cause and effect situation
and that is exactly what he found the cable in the attic fed the outlet used by the 1500 watt space heater and
the curling iron that's what really frosted the cake for us we had an origin cause it could not be disproven
scientifically and we had a connection between the differences in what was done that night what had been done before and
that gives you a very strong presumptive case for an accidental fire dr hurst believes
several factors created the chain of events that culminated with the fatal fire water from the leaking roof
washed the flame retardant chemicals off of the paper insulation in the attic and
further eroded the 50-year-old electrical cable over time as the rainwater hit the
exposed portion of the electrical cable it arched burning the wooden attic beam and leaving behind char marks or carbon
tracks wood does not conduct electricity but carbon does [Music] dr hurst believes that when terry
plugged in the 1500 watt space heater that night it heated the electrical wires in the attic which arched
those sparks touched a carbon track which ignited the paper insulation just above joshua's bedroom closet
a wooden ceiling with a an already well-built fire that suddenly breaks through produces a holocaust in no time at all
the fiery debris from the attic fell through the hole in the ceiling onto the floor of the closet
and did not start on the floor and burn upwards as local investigators suspected
ken gibson believes that the fire officials rushed to judgment so anything that doesn't fall into the
theory that that this was part of how the arsonist started the fire to them it's not evidence it's just
something that's there dr hurst sent the local prosecutor his critique of the government's
investigation which said their conclusions were based on junk science not only is there a badly melted and arced wire
it had arc marks on it which could have been caused by the fire but which could also have
initiated the fire no way to tell and that wire passed across dead center in the hole in the
ceiling quite a coincidence to his credit the district attorney studied dr hurst's
report conducted his own investigation and dropped the charges against terry henson
but by the time it was all over she had lost her home her child and nearly her freedom because
of an inaccurate conclusion drawn from faulty science fire investigation in general is
the swamp of forensic science in fact many forensic scientists refused to recognize arsenal investigation
as a subfield of forensic science i think terry's story in many respects is heroic
she was not a very well-educated woman although she's extremely intelligent and she had just enough computer studies at
her community college to know that if she was going to be under house arrest she needed some way where she could put
herself out into the world even if it was only through her computer and email there's people sitting in prison that
have gone through what i've gone through but they didn't have the help they didn't know how to get it
didn't have the money and that's not fair terry henson cherishes her freedom and the time she
spends with brittany yet terry thinks of joshua every day what he would have looked like
what kind of person he'd be remembering the good times i look around and i see them everywhere
[Music] we ran and we played and we had the dog to play with he swaying out of the
street it's not fair [Music] [Music] you

In 1996, 17-month-old Josh Hinson died in a fire which a federal agency ruled was intentionally set by Josh's mother Terri Strickland. Using the then-emerging resources of the Internet, Terri Strickland undertook her own investigation.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

A mother fights to prove her innocence after a fire kills her son and injures her daughter, revealing flaws in the investigation.

Key points

The Tragic Fire. In 1996, a fire in North Carolina claimed the life of 17-month-old Joshua Henson.
The Investigation Begins. Investigators suspect foul play after discovering evidence of arson in the Henson home.
Terry's Fight for Justice. After being wrongfully accused, Terry Henson conducts her own investigation into the fire.
Charges Dropped. After new evidence emerges, the district attorney drops charges against Terry Henson.
A Mother's Grief. Terry reflects on the loss of her son Joshua and cherishes her time with Brittany.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I really loved him like he was my actual child.

Terry reflects on her love for Joshua.

3:47WatchNov 18, 2021

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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