Police Life: The Experts podcast - Season 3 Episode 3: Stopping a fire starter - transcript

It’s summer 2019 and Bendigo’s Detective Senior Constable Andy Heazlewood is determined to track down the perpetrator behind a series of suspicious grass fires.

Locals fear it’s only a matter of time before flames threaten their farms, but a complex investigation is underway, and police are on the hunt.

Listen to this episode and other episodes of Victoria Police's official podcast, Police Life: The Experts.

Transcript of Police Life: The Experts podcast, Season 3 Episode 3: Stopping a fire starter

Voiceover: You’re listening to Police Life: The Experts, a Victoria Police podcast shining a light on our people and their extraordinary skills.

Voiceover: This podcast episode contains strong language. Listener discretion is advised. Conversations captured by covert listening devices have been recreated in this episode by voice actors.

[Sound of flames leading into suspenseful music]

Voiceover: It’s 2pm on Friday the 13th of December 2019 and Detective Senior Constable Andy Heazlewood has just started his afternoon shift at the Bendigo Crime Investigation Unit.

His work as a local detective usually involves solving burglaries, serious assaults, fraud and more. But, today, things are much more tense than usual.

[Night sounds, crickets and cicadas]

Voiceover: A serial arsonist has been terrorising nearby farming communities. The firebug had started five different fires at around 11.30pm on Friday nights over the past five weeks. They were lit in dry grass on the side of the Midland Highway, Elmore-Barnadown Road and other backroads between Bendigo and Shepparton in central Victoria.

Detective Senior Constable Andy Heazlewood: It was an extremely high topic of conversation. The people, especially those ones that were living on the Elmore-Barnadown Road, were petrified when Friday night came around.

[Suspenseful music plays]

Voiceover: By pure luck, each of the fires had been spotted by witnesses not long after ignition, which allowed the Country Fire Authority, known as the CFA, to put them out before they got out of control.

But this was during a particularly hot, dry summer... One that would later be called ‘Black summer’ because of the catastrophic bushfires that ravaged parts of the state.

Andy explains how the pattern of Friday night fires had residents and farmers living on edge.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: A lot of them are members of the CFA, and a lot of them, looking back as I spoke to them, they were petrified. ‘Is it my house that’s going to burn tonight? Am I going to be away fighting a fire at my mate’s house, next minute there's a fire at my house, and I can't be there defending my house and helping my family’.

They were absolutely petrified.

[Heartbeat sounds leading into ominous music]

Voiceover: So when Andy and his shift partner Detective Senior Constable Jessie Uren started work that Friday the 13th, everyone was on red alert.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: The possibility of a fire on the Friday night was definitely on my mind. It had happened reasonably regularly. And from the other members, I knew that around late Friday night there could be a fire, but I wasn't ready for it to happen at about 3.30 in the afternoon, which kind of surprised me.

I thought I was going to have a reasonably quiet afternoon until the police communications started really ramping up in relation to some fires that had occurred in Goornong. There was one quite large fire, and then another one was seen and reported pretty soon after that.

When I heard the fire and the location of the fire being the Elmore-Barnadown Road, I pretty much decided to go there and start investigating, because it was at that time the epicentre of where the fires had been, even though it was out of sync with their regular pattern being at 3.30 instead of 11.30 at night.

[Sounds of fire and sirens]

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: But getting to that fire scene, Jessie was with me. But you just look at the huge expanse of blackened earth and you think, ‘Oh my god, this is all mine. I'm going to have to get to the end of this, and it's going to be extremely hard’.

There was plenty of fire appliances there. There was a command vehicle. I think there was helicopters going at that stage. And as a detective and knowing that it could have been part of the same fire series, it's actually pretty confronting.

So, I'm horrible with judging land size.

I just look at things and go big, real big or enormous. But I was told that that one was 180 acres.

That big fire, Ken Micheel was the guy whose property that was. That destroyed part of a crop, an extensive amount of fencing, which is extremely expensive. People don't think about how much fencing costs, but it's actually very expensive.

And the wind had picked up that afternoon and got the fire spreading quite quickly north towards his shedding, towards his house, towards his machinery, towards his livelihood. And it was stopped.

I think he said that the fire actually went under some of his machinery before it was put out. And I'm pretty sure that it was only stopped on the northern edge by the Campaspe River.

It's only due to the work of the CFA and helicopter bombers and all that sort of stuff that that fire was put out and didn't destroy his livelihood completely.

[Sound of fire crackling over suspenseful twinkling music]

Voiceover: The fire caused almost $65,000 damage to Ken Micheel’s farm and property and the huge effort required to put it out came at a cost of almost $250,000 to the CFA.

It was by far the biggest fire lit by the arsonist, but not the only one that afternoon. Another two small fires were started around the same time.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: I got quite a lot of assistance from the uniform. Again, from my offsider Jessie Uren, was fantastic.

She was off furiously scribbling notes, speaking to witnesses, getting accounts of what they saw, organising for the traffic management points, police cutting off traffic, to also, if they could, get some intel about what cars had been coming and going.

But we did what we do with every investigation, to get as much as we can get from the scene, sort of perishable evidence. What do I have to get now that I need to get right now?

Another thing with fires, especially country fires, is that the local residents, they're very heavily invested in trying to stop their own place burning and trying to stop their neighbour's place burning.

So we'd had got quite a bit of information about vehicles that had been seen, people that had been seen acting a little bit funny.

You're trying to get it down and get a record of it so that you can come back to it later. And if it is something, then you can use it to solve.

[Suspenseful music plays]

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: After doing all our initial action out at Goornong, myself and Jessie came back to the police station, did what we needed to do back here, start brainstorming.

‘What are we going to do?’ We've got these vehicles that have been seen, there's people that have been seen suspicious. ‘OK, just get it all ready to go, investigate it as far as we can’, and then, I kind of knocked off work at about 10.30 at night, having done as much as I thought I could possibly do on those four fires for the afternoon.

As it happens, the phone rang not long after I'd gone back and my head had hit the pillow.

[Subtle instrumental music plays]

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: And that was to tell me that there'd been another seven or so fires, that they were almost certainly a pattern, that they had been along the Midland Highway.

At the end of the afternoon session, I was thinking, well, hopefully one’s got out of control, if it's some kids or someone just mucking around, they've realised how bad things can get and they'll pull their head in and stop. But they didn't. They escalated. So everyone was on the same page as to, this is a big, big problem.

Voiceover: Andy got to work on investigating some persons of interest, known as POIs.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: At the time, we had one POI, which was a pretty strong one that came from Frankston. So I did a phone check to see where that person was right then.

And it turns out that they were back in Frankston. I was looking at it and going, ‘Theoretically, this person could have lit the fires and then hammered it back to Frankston and got home and got to bed, but it was unlikely’. They would have to have just fanged it all the way down.

So they weren't ruled out. But that strong POI became a much lesser suspect.

So I got back into work after a few hours sleep and my first step is to make contact with the Arson Squad. They already knew about the jobs because we have an internal serious incident reporting system. And organise for the arson chemist to come up.

The chemist for the day was Laura Noonan, and she came up with Kayla Gonzalez, and they started kind of at the south end, which was Axedale, which is reasonably close to Bendigo.

And looking back at the photos, the sun was coming up in the Axedale photos and by the time they finished for the day, the sun was almost at the horizon on the other side.

Huge day. But they love their job and they're really good at it.

Like everyone else just looks at a big patch of burnt grass and goes, ‘I don't know, it all looks burnt, I don't know how it started or where it started’.

Forensic officer Laura Noonan: Even though essentially every day we go to a fire scene and you're looking at burnt stuff, no two scenes are the same, which is I think what we all love about the job, is that there's always a challenge, always a variety of different work that we, that we do, so it just keeps it really interesting.

My name is Laura Noonan. I'm a forensic officer in the Fire and Explosion Unit within the Victoria Police Forensic Services Centre. So my main role is that I'm a chemist in both fire and explosion investigation.

Generally we will only attend grass fires when we know that there's a bit of a series happening. We don't go to just one-off grass fires because there's simply too many for us to do, so, but given that there had been 10 in a 24-hour period in a relatively small patch between Bendigo and Shepparton, then that sort of ticked our boxes and met our criteria for us to attend.

[Sounds of wind blowing in grass, insects and birds over suspenseful twinkling music]

Laura Noonan: So the first thing that we do is we photograph the scene before we start doing anything else. So the technical assistant will photograph the scene and then as a chemist we do a scene diagram so a rough sketch of the area, make note of what is in the area, so with grass fires and roadside fires we're looking at things like the type of road that it's on the side of.

Like, is it a busy road? Is it a gravel road? How wide is it? How big is the verge? What's the vegetation like on the verge? Are there power lines? Are there electric fences? Does it look like there's been any works in progress, like on infrastructure and things like that? Has the area recently been mown? Kind of, all those types of things that, looking for things that may have contributed to the fire or that may have an influence one way or the other.

And so, while the scene is getting photographed, I'm doing a diagram. And so the diagram helps not only like to form part of our notes, but as we're sketching, you're constantly observing and looking at all the different burn patterns and trying to find particular burn indicators that give us an indication of the direction of fire travel.

And then that is hopefully helping us establish an area of fire origin.

So grass fires are very different to structure fires and the patterns that we're observing, but the principles are all kind of the same. So in grass fires in particular, we're looking at things, essentially comparing blades of grass to other blades of grass, which can be a bit tedious at times. But, once you sort of get your head around it and work out a good system of um, sort of determining what, what it's telling you, you can paint a really nice picture of what's happened.

Voiceover: After spending the morning processing a number of the smaller fire scenes, Laura and her technical assistant Kayla arrived at the site of the massive Goornong fire in the middle of the day.

[Sound of a car on gravel leading into fire crackling]

Laura Noonan: I just remember pulling up and we were sort of in the bottom corner of the burnt area, I suppose, and then it was just black as far as the eye could see then.

And you could see that a shed had been burnt as well and collapsed down and significant damage in this area.

[Suspenseful music plays]

Laura Noonan: I think from memory, too, sort of beyond the paddock, it looked like quite dense bushland as well. So I think the CFA did a really good job to stop it when they did.

And also this is when the CFA are really helpful because they were able to tell me that when they first arrived on scene, the fire had only gotten to a particular point. So I knew that then everything beyond that was fire spread and that I didn't specifically need to search through those areas looking for anything.

So we knew that from that point to the roadside is where we were looking at. So then again, just using all the same principles, just were able to bring it back and it, and it just looked like it had started like all the other ones along the roadside, but it had just, for some reason, taken a lot better.

And that's the thing with fires. And I think some people don't appreciate fires for what they can do really. And they're very unpredictable. And if you don't understand, sort of, the chemistry and the fire dynamics behind it all, it's difficult to predict what is going to happen, and they can very quickly get out of control. So yeah, they are scary from that point of view.

Voiceover: After the fire-lighting sprees in the afternoon and night on Friday the 13th of December, Andy was made the lead investigator. But on the following Monday, a meeting was held that would result in the investigation being shifted to second spot on the list of priorities.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: As soon as there's a dozen fires in one day, everyone knows, I know, the chemists know, Command knows, all the coppers know that this, this is a big deal.

The CFA were here, Command were here, the local inspectors were here, the boss of the Central Victorian Response Unit was here, my boss was here, uniformed people were here.

A big meeting about what's going to happen in relation to it. And obviously it's an investigation into, ‘Who started it and how can we stop them?’ But it's also a conversation around people's safety, because it had got out of control and then this person or people had escalated.

Number one is to make sure that nobody dies. So that, that was a lot of the discussion on the Monday meeting.

So it's really difficult with fires out in the middle of nowhere because, by the time anyone notices anything, something on fire, what they needed to see, which was the offenders driving the other direction they've just discounted as another car driver, and no one pays attention to what happened five minutes ago, only what happened after they saw the fire. But by then, it's far too late.

So one of the things we were weighing up is, ‘How long is it going to take us to figure out?’ And the answer is it's going to take a long time. So with safety at the forefront, we can't just let things slide and be not proactive. We have to get out there and kind of suppress these people, suppress their activity.

If we do the suppression correctly, and we do suppress the offenders from committing the offences that are in that series on the Friday night, we are going to get no more fires, and we're going to get no more evidence further than we already had up until the 13th.

At that point, we had people that we thought might be responsible. But the list was quite long. We couldn't have those people being surveilled or watched or anything and have confidence that we definitely could keep an eyeball on whoever the arsonist was. So we had to be as overt as we could be and kind of flood the whole area on Friday afternoons with visible police, with a visible police presence.

Because the area that the person responsible or people responsible had been operating in was quite large, we had police members from all the smaller police stations, Axedale, Heathcote, Goornong, Elmore, up to Echuca, involved.

I can't say how many units were involved.

There’d be, at a guess, there'd be 20 to 30 police on the Friday night devoted to being a presence out there to suppress whoever this was.

[Suspenseful music plays]

Voiceover: The suppression strategy worked. The intensive police patrols on Fridays along the Midland Highway and Elmore-Barnadown Road began on the 20th of December 2019.

[Sound of car passing]

Voiceover: The arsonist’s pattern of offending came to an abrupt stop.

New evidence also came to a stop, but Andy and his colleagues at Bendigo CIU were still hunting for the offender and also taking part in the suppression patrols.

But it was still the middle of an especially-dry summer in central Victoria, so fires were inevitable.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: We had our suppression strategy underway with as many police as we could throw at the area as we could, but still, fires kept happening in the wider area, and in this area that the people had been operating in. Sometimes they were on different days.

But we couldn't discount those fires as being part of this series because the offender had strayed already from their usual 11.30 at night Friday. They’d strayed and gone to 3.30 in the afternoon on a Friday, and we couldn't be certain that maybe a fire on a Tuesday wasn't part of them.

So I was furiously investigating further fires that were happening, the original fires, and plus still doing crime shifts and investigating my day-to-day stuff. So robberies and frauds and stabbings and all the rest of the stuff that we do from day to day.

So some of the people that we identified as good candidates were what we considered to be really good candidates. There was a guy that had moved to the greater Bendigo area, not this area, but not far away, that was an extremely prolific arsonist and had just moved within the last couple of months to our area. And he was quite high up on the list.

There was another guy that had committed the same type of offending, as in roadside grass fires, was aiming at haystacks at the time, but they'd been operating about 100 k's away.

And that person had just moved to Goornong, which was right in the middle of this stuff. And we thought, well, they're a red-hot contender as well. But again, you can't just look at the red-hot contenders because you're probably going to be wrong. It's a recipe for failure. You’re gonna overlook something.

So, even though these people were red-hot suspects, we still pursued every other person as, as hard as we could to try and figure out who it was.

One thing that came about during this time on the 2nd of January, the Shepparton detectives arrested a fella that had been seen on the side of the road lighting a grass fire. The exact same thing that we were investigating.

It wasn't along the Midland Highway, but we were pretty happy at that stage, that whoever it was that was lighting these fires was travelling between Bendigo and somewhere near Shepparton.

This fella that they'd seen lighting the fires, they actually were pointed out, they were, they were Johnny on the spot, and he got arrested and interviewed in relation to lighting that fire.

The detectives there obviously knew about the fires over here and drew my attention to that. And we began investigating that fella pretty heavily.

At the time I was thinking, hopefully it is this guy, hopefully we're on to it. Hopefully we can get to the end and stop investigating all these other people cause it's quite draining, going hammer and tongs investigating 10 or 20 people.

We, we just want to investigate one. We just want to send the resources towards one person, and trying to get the evidence for that person that they've committed all these other fires. So I had my hopes up. I was, I was quite excited actually.

That fella ended up getting released for that particular fire, but he was under investigation for all the other fires, and he became our number one suspect for the fires here.

Voiceover: With the original pattern of fires having come to a halt for four weeks, the suppression patrols were scaled back on the 17th of January.

Unmarked police cars kept up a covert presence on the roads of interest. But people in the area were still living in fear.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: The only way that those people weren't going to be as on edge and fearful, would be when we could announce that an offender, or offenders, had been arrested and hopefully had been remanded, and were, there was absolutely no possibility. So that was the only thing that was going to make those people feel safe.

Voiceover: One of those people who worried if his property would be the next to go up in flames was farmer Stuart Niven.

[Instrumental music plays with sounds of birds chirping]

Voiceover: Stuart has lived in Elmore for more than 60 years and said the tight-knit farming community was originally unsure about the cause of the fires.

Stuart Niven: Yeah, there was just a bit happening around the area. Well, noone was really sure what was going on, whether they were combustion or whether it was someone actually lighting them for a start. It was becoming too regular and too obvious that, ‘Oh look out there is someone, these are getting ignited’.

You’d never know what was gonna happen, if it was gonna happen where the next one was gonna be. You're on edge and you're just not sure what was next in line, that's for sure.

And it did happen one night, out where I work, where I am now actually, there was reports of some spot fires and then all of a sudden there was spot fire elsewhere. And couple of them were only hoaxes but then there was a fair dinkum one and they were just trying to get everyone away from where, where it was lit.

Everyone was starting to get pretty anxious then about trying to find someone, the culprit doing this and sort them out.

[Suspenseful music plays]

Voiceover: Stuart and his neighbours were right to still be on edge because, on the Friday night that visible police patrols were scaled back, the arsonist lit another fire on the Elmore-Barnadown road at 11.40pm.

Andy was then even more determined to catch the offender and keep his community safe.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: So the fella that got arrested in Shepparton, he had his phone seized and phones are an extremely valuable tool for us. Extremely. If we can get into the phone, and, nine times out of 10 we can get into their phone, there is an absolute wealth of information in there. It's pretty much everyone's personal diary.

And we had some issues about the legality or how best to go from an evidentiary standpoint and looking all the way down the track at being at a trial and saying we have complied with the letter of the law in relation to getting into this phone and looking at their private life. So there was a bit of to and fro there.

Voiceover: In the meantime, police patrols ramped back up on Friday the 24th of January, with both marked and unmarked police cars.

[Faint rumbling plays in background]

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: One of those unmarked cars keeping an eye on the road contained myself and my senior sergeant, Rod Stewart, working late at night on a Friday to try and identify who was using the Elmore-Barnadown Road in that area at that time.

My boss is pretty old school. He lies and he says that he doesn't want to get involved, but he does. He loves catching a crook. He absolutely loves it.

He pretty much volunteered to be my offsider for the night, or he did volunteer to be my offsider on the night, and we're sitting in the dark out on the Murchison Road just before the Elmore-Barnadown Road just waiting to see what happens. Who's going past there, we're gonna pull them over and talk to ‘em, and figure out who is using that road.

It's a back road. If you were going to Elmore, or if you’re going to Shepparton, and you wanted to use a back road, you'd use the Elmore-Barnadown Road.

[Suspenseful music plays and slowly intensifies]

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: The first thing I saw really pricked my interest. I saw a vehicle, at that distance in the dark, we can't tell what it is. But I saw a vehicle pull over directly where a fire had started just south of the intersection that we were looking at.

It pulled over and I was nearly willing him, or her, whoever it was, willing them, ‘You’ve pulled over, that's weird as. Light a fire now, go on, light one right now, I've got you covered, light it right now’.

A fire wasn't lit, but I thought that sort of behaviour was extremely suspicious. So as soon as that car pulled off, myself and my boss shot off straight after it, and caught up to it not far down the Elmore-Barnadown Road.

As we got closer and closer, I was getting more and more excited, until I saw across the back of that vehicle the word ‘police’.

[Suspenseful music comes to an abrupt stop]

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: It was Matt Beck who was doing part of the proactive patrols for us in his four-wheel drive.

I spoke to Becky like I usually speak to him, I was going, ‘Becky, what the hell were you doing back there?’ I’m going, ‘mate, I thought I had ya, I thought you were the crook’.

He's gone, ‘Sorry, I apologise for not being the crook’. And off we went.

And then yeah, we just went straight back to our hidey hole and kept an eye on the road. And for a little while nothing happened. And then we did see another car heading down the road.

This was pretty much spot on 11.30 and spot on exactly where our offender was travelling at the exact time every Friday night.

So we shot off to figure out who was driving that car.

We pulled up, turned our lights on. The driver pulled over to the left. I walked up to the driver, and in my head, I'd kind of rehearsed a speech as to what I was gonna say, cause it could be the, it could be our offender.

And part of the process was, in my mind, just making sure that that person was suppressed. It was probably not going to be an arrest day that day, but just let them know that that's exactly what we’re there for.

And I like to be upfront with people too as well. I don't beat about the bush. I find it's a bad way to do business. I'll just tell him exactly why I'm there. So I went up to the driver and I said, ‘G'day, my name's Andy Heazlewood, I’m one of the detectives at Bendigo. We're just here because there's been a lot of fires in the area. Have you seen anything? And what's your name?’ And there was three people in the car, and they told me.

[Suspenseful music plays]

Voiceover: They were brothers Justin and Scott Hagley, and their friend Andrew Valli.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: They were easy to talk to. They just answer questions that I was asking quite readily. They didn't look like they were trying to hide anything, they weren't being evasive, they didn't look suspicious.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: Once I'd got their names, then I asked them what they were doing on that part of the road, if they'd seen anything.

They told me something that immediately, my brain started going a million miles an hour. They told me that they were going down that road because they go bowling at Shepparton every Friday night and they always come back along this road.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: And right then it just fits straight into the pattern. It's a very, very quiet road. It's someone that goes every single Friday night. I was thinking about bowling leagues. I was thinking the bowling leagues are going to be the same time every Friday night, so they're gonna finish at around about the same time every Friday night. They're gonna be going past this area, at this point, on this road, every Friday night. And I, internally, I started jumping up and down.

So I just obtained their details. I went back, we had a portable device to do some checks. As I got back to the car, I was already excited, and I did some checks, and I found out two of the three had priors for committing a very serious arson series in 2006 in Bendigo.

And I was pretty much decided I'd hit the jackpot. We'll still keep investigating other people, but it is 100% gonna be these guys.

I actually had like a quick investigator conversation in my head, ‘What's going to go now? I could probably arrest them right now, and put to ‘em that the fires happened every Friday night, ask them to explain themselves’. But it's an incredibly serious offence. And people, funnily enough, they're not really willing to admit to a really serious offence. They're, they’re not going to admit it. No way.

So now I've got to get evidence against these guys. I've got to actually cut ‘em loose and start looking into ‘em and see if I can match ‘em up to the other series in an evidentiary manner. And part of it, the internal investigator conversation as well, is, if I continue to question them in regards to the fires, I've got to give them caution and rights.

And I don't want to do that. I just want to send them on their way, think that the police have just looked ‘em over and keep as much evidence coming forward as I possibly could.

We got back in the car and we drove off and I've probably never seen my boss so excited. He was, he was nearly punching the air. He's going, ‘You've got them, Andy, you've got them!’

So once we came up with these guys, the focus did shift for the investigation thankfully away from trying to figure out who it was and then switching to, ‘OK, how am I going to prove it's them? And how am I going to prove it to a jury that it's them?’

And that was the big difficulty to overcome. They're lighting fires out in the middle of nowhere, seen by no one, recorded by no one, photographed by no one.

So we did quite a lot of work with phone checks and trying to identify if these guys were in the right areas at the right times. They said that they'd driven Shepparton to bowl every Friday night but maybe they weren't, maybe one Friday night, maybe I've got it wrong. Maybe one Friday night they didn't go to Shepparton, maybe one Friday night they were in Gippsland. Or maybe they were over in Mildura, or maybe they just stayed home.

So I had to judge what I could, the evidence I could get against the, the scenario that I had. And as it turns out, nothing disproved that it was them, cause it was them.

On the 13th of December 2019, we had the afternoon series and that was on the Elmore-Barnadown Road heading north, and there was some others up at the Midland Highway. But then the series on the way back from Shepparton, it went over to Elmore along the Midland Highway, but it deviated, it went down the Northern Highway instead of the Midland Highway.

I'm drawing signs in the air here but, instead of going kind of south-west, it went kind of south-east, and the mobile phone towers that the fires were close to were also, it changed. And the three, three people, they changed their location to match the series of fires as the series of fires changed.

I know it's these guys. And I think to myself, ‘How do I know it's these guys?’ It's probability.

It's incredibly improbable that if the fire series changed direction and my crooks changed direction as well, it's incredibly improbable that it could be anyone other than them.

[Suspenseful music plays]

Voiceover: But as compelling as the phone location data was, it was still circumstantial evidence and Andy wanted to have a watertight case to be sure he could lock these dangerous serial arsonists away.

As he and his Bendigo CIU colleagues worked hard to strengthen the case against Justin and Scott Hagley and Andrew Valli, the highly visible police patrols continued along the usual routes.

Voiceover: But this didn’t deter these three offenders. Over the next few weeks, they kept lighting fires on their way home from tenpin bowling but along different routes.

[Sound of flames]

Voiceover: One of the worst of these fires was at Stuart Niven’s farm at Elmore. A whole summer’s hard work, a huge haystack, went up in flames.

Stuart Niven: There was a stack of straw, wheat and straw after the, the grain had been stripped off the top of it, and then it was cut and bailed and stacked not far from the highway so that we could get at it and deliver it during the year when hopefully things got wet again.

So there was close to 500 bales in the stack, I think, and yeah, lost half of them in that fire. We were lucky we didn't lose them all, but at midnight we were out there, there was probably 20 volunteers with front-end loaders and fire trucks and home fire units and we were lucky enough to save half the bales by, by moving them and getting the others under control.

[Sound of fire crackling and ominous music]

Voiceover: Haystack fires are notoriously difficult to put out, and this one burned for two days.

Stuart lost more than $26,000 of hay and the fire cost the CFA more than $63,000 to extinguish.

Stuart Niven: The anger comes into it cause we were losing product that we work hard to, like, we had to cut the straw and bale it and stack it and then all of a sudden it's just getting burnt from under your nose. So naturally, yeah, you get pretty upset with... we have enough dramas, just natural dramas, without it being enforced on you.

[Ominous music continues]

Voiceover: On the 20th of March 2020, Andy and his sergeant Anthony Thomas travelled to Shepparton to get a feel for the trio’s regular Friday routine.

The detectives found out the Hagleys and Valli played each week in tenpin bowling competitions under the team names of ‘The three terrors’ and ‘Bad Boys 2’.

Andy and Anthony stayed in Shepparton until after the trio finished bowling.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: We left and we started doing some different type of phone checks, which are a bit more accurate than the previous ones as we were going back, and we kind of followed them, virtually, as they left Shepparton, drove towards Elmore. And as they drove towards Elmore, we were watching where they were and we heard...

[Radio static sound]

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: “Any unit clear? Got a fire burning on the Midland Highway".

It would have been somewhere around Corop. And we've gone, ‘OK, where were they? They were just there. Minutes ago they were there and now there's a fire’.

And then a couple of minutes later...

[Radio static sound]

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: "Any unit clear? Got another grass fire in Carag Carag. Any unit clear? We've got another grass fire in Elmore".

So we were watching these fires happen, they were just there. We'll look at these points that they'd just been minutes before this is going to look great to a jury. It makes it a lot more clear to a jury how improbable it could be that it was anything other than Justin, Scott and Andrew.

Now we believe that Justin, who was the driver, always as it turns out, would drop off Andrew back in Quarry Hill, which is kind of a central suburb of Bendigo, and then that him and Scott would go back out to Huntly.

But this time, as we were watching ‘em, virtually, they went out to Eaglehawk, and we’re going, ‘Oh, what the hell are they doing out at Eaglehawk?’ And they were near a road out there, McCormacks Road, I think it was. ‘Well what's out there? There's nothing much out there. We don't know of anyone that they know out that way’.

And then the call came through.

[Radio static sound]

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: "Any unit clear for a fire in McCormacks Road, Eaglehawk?"

And this, this is a step up. So previously they’d, they’d lit fires out in rural areas. But this is very much a residential area.

Going there the next day, it was very close to a gas main. They, they’d stepped it up. And they're getting closer and closer in towards residential areas where people's homes are.

This is midnight pretty much, people are going to be home in bed. They're not going to be ready for a fire on their doorstep.

I already felt quite a lot of pressure to try and solve this, but knowing that they were escalating, getting closer and closer towards potentially setting fire to houses with people inside, it um, actually ramped up the pressure for me quite a lot.

And in the back of my mind, the best evidence would be an admission. Them confessing to committing the crime. Because of the seriousness of it, I didn't think that they would admit it readily. As in, ‘Oh, g'day, my name's Andy Heazlewood, I just want to talk about these fires’. ‘Oh yeah, yeah, we lit all those fires and I want to light heaps more’.

That's not gonna happen. I need to get a lawfully obtained frank admission that I can produce to the court. And there's a few different ways that we can get them.

[Suspenseful music plays]

Voiceover: So just days later, Victoria Police operatives secretly installed a listening device and a tracking device in Justin Hagley’s Mazda ute.

Andy and all the police invested in ending the arsonists’ four-and-a-half-month campaign of terror were looking forward to the next Friday, the 27th of March 2020.

They knew that when the trio would be driving back from bowling, they would get the evidence they needed to snuff out any more offending.

Hopes were high. But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit Victoria. New public health restrictions meant that all indoor sporting would have to close... and that included the bowling alley in Shepparton.

[Crumbling sound]

Voiceover: Andy was gutted.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: There was no way they were going to Shepparton that night. They can't bowl. They don't do anything else in Shepparton. They might drive there to get a pizza, but I'm sure they can get a pizza closer.

And I thought I was probably going to be out of luck. As it turns out, I was extremely lucky.

You could look at it and say, well, their main purpose on a Friday night was to bowl in Shepparton. They bowl in a league and then secondary to that, they light fires on the way back. But as it turns out, they couldn't bowl, but they had to light fires.

So we're in the police station in a room we've got dedicated for the purpose, listening to what we could hear in the car.

Maybe they're gonna talk about what they did last Friday. Maybe they're going to say, ‘Ahh wish we could light some fires tonight’, or something like that. We're still hoping to get something.

I thought, hopefully they might talk about things that they’d done previously. Maybe one of them is gonna say, ‘Hey, remember that fire that we lit last Friday at Elmore? Oh remember the time we lit the fire at the grave site?’

The conversation might flow into that sort of an admission, which would be fantastic.

So that night, Justin and Scott picked up Andrew, and the first place that they went after they picked him up was the IGA in Kangaroo Flat. And the reason that they went there, when I looked at the video, they bought two packets of sparklers.

[Sound of lit sparklers]

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: And it wasn't their birthday.

[Suspenseful twinkling music plays]

Voiceover: The listening device planted in the car picked up a conversation about the sparklers, with Valli asking Scott Hagley where they planned to throw the sparklers.

Scott replied...

[Recreated audio from police wiretap]

Scott Hagley (voice actor): “Wherever there’s dry grass, mate. Beats stopping and starting all the time, ‘specially on the Calder Highway.”

[Recreated audio ends]

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: After they bought the sparklers, instead of going north towards Elmore, they kept going south. I didn't know why they were going to Melbourne, or heading towards Melbourne, but they were actually talking about fire related things.

As it became more and more evident that there is a good chance that they are going to light a fire tonight, then we hadn't prepared for them going anywhere but north, and they were going south.

So then we have to start making contact with other police stations and other areas, and just warn them that they might have some arsonists heading into their area. And trying to formulate some sort of a plan as to what would happen if they did light a fire and we, we got that crucial, either an admission that they’d lit the previous fires, or that they'd start lighting fires that night.

[Suspenseful music plays]

Voiceover: On their drive to Melbourne, the trio pulled into a dirt car park that is used as an area to watch airplanes taking off from Melbourne Airport.

While there, they bought ice creams from a Mr Whippy-style van about 5.30pm.

Justin Hagley was feeling nostalgic…

[Recreated audio from police wiretap]

Justin Hagley (voice actor): “Me and Scott used to come down here all the fucken time, every couple of days”.

[Recreated audio ends]

Voiceover: But Andrew Valli replied...

[Recreated audio from police wiretap]

Andrew Valli (voice actor): “Not interested in talking about ice creams now. I’m more interested in a fire, alright?”.

[Recreated audio ends]

Voiceover: They got back on the road and just 20 minutes later, Valli again vented his impatience…

[Recreated audio from police wiretap]

Andrew Valli (voice actor): “Started to get fucking frustrated. Been driving for nearly two hours and not one fire has been lit. What the fuck’s going on?”.

[Recreated audio ends]

Voiceover: Justin replied...

[Recreated audio from police wiretap]

Justin Hagley (voice actor): “That’s why we’re going out here”.

[Recreated audio ends]

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: So some of the comments they said, I was already excited that I've probably got really good evidence, as in probably got really good evidence, and then they kept ramping it up and the evidence just kept getting better and better and was going to look worse and worse to a jury, which obviously made me really excited.

Voiceover: As he tuned in to the listening device back at Bendigo Police Station, it became clear to Andy that they had begun trying to light fires by throwing lit sparklers out of the moving car.

[Sound of car driving on a road and lit sparklers]

Voiceover: But they were without much success. Much to Valli’s frustration…

[Recreated audio from police wiretap]

Justin Hagley (voice actor): “All these fuckers keep going out when they hit the ground. Too fast when we throw ‘em out”.

[Recreated audio ends]

Voiceover: Justin Hagley replied…

[Recreated audio from police wiretap]

Justin Hagley (voice actor): “They should still stay going. We’ve done it before travelling at this speed and yeah they’ve stayed going.”

[Recreated audio ends]

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: These guys, their primary ambition is to light some fires. And it's probably along the same lines as someone who goes out on a Saturday and their primary purpose is to catch fish. And they get out there at 12 o’clock in the afternoon or whenever they get there, they've got the whole afternoon ahead of them, they throw a rod in, they try a couple of different lures, nothing's really working.

They know they've gotta be back at 6 o’clock and the closer and closer it gets to 6 o’clock, they get angrier and angrier that they haven't caught a fish yet.

And it was the same sort of story with these guys. They had plenty of time, but the time doesn't last forever. And they were getting angrier and angrier and more and more upset that they haven't realised their primary goal. And their primary goal is to start a large fire.

[Sound of clock ticking fast and then slowing down]

Voiceover: At 7.30pm, they arrived at Port Melbourne to eat fish and chips, before driving to St Kilda, where they yelled abuse at passers-by and looked for prostitutes.

[Suspenseful music plays]

Voiceover: At one point, they smelled smoke from a fire, which prompted Valli to say…

[Recreated audio from police wiretap]

Andrew Valli (voice actor): “Can’t wait to get a big orange fucking flame going.”

[Recreated audio ends]

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: Obviously you can't start a bushfire in the foreshore of Port Melbourne, and you can't do it unobserved. So they filled in a bit of time down there before they decided enough's enough, let's head back, the night's getting old, we've got places to be and fires to light.

[Ominous music plays]

Voiceover: At 9pm, they arrived back at the airport viewing area for another round of ice creams. They then drove a short distance before parking.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: They stopped again and talked about fires again. They went away from the car for some time, so we couldn't really hear what was going on. And when they came back, it became apparent that they were thinking about starting a structural fire.

It really puts the pressure on even just a little bit more that um, it needs to, it needs to stop. It needs to stop now.

Voiceover: But more evidence continued to roll in from the listening device, with Justin Hagley saying…

[Recreated audio from police wiretap]

Justin Hagley (voice actor): “You know that fire that we did last week? Well they had it all safe by 12 o’clock. The next morning they went back there and re-extinguished it again because it reignited.”

“And that one we did near Stanhope there, that one me and you did, they had that one safe and then they were back there the next morning.”

[Recreated audio ends and suspenseful music plays]

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: Some of my dream conversations that they could have talked about actually happened.

Myself and Anthony Thomas were already on our way down because we’d decided, yep, that's enough, today's arrest day.

[Suspenseful music intensifies]

Voiceover: They continued to light and attempt to light fires until 10pm when the listening device captured the moment when Justin Hagley told his fellow fire starters that he had just spotted an unmarked police car driving past.

[Sound of car slowly driving past]

Voiceover: In that unmarked car were Andy and Sergeant Anthony Thomas.

But stunningly, the trio kept trying to light fires as they drove along.

[Sound of flames]

Voiceover: This just gave andy even more evidence as he and anthony stopped at the various scenes to photograph the fires in action, while also calling in the CFA to put them out.

But they were also calling other police from Heathcote to intercept the offenders.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: They saw the police car going the other way, and they saw the police car turn around and start chasing after ‘em, and they tried, they tried to hide. But there's really nowhere to hide if you're being tracked.

So the Heathcote coppers were able to follow them. They pulled down like a little dirt track off the Northern Highway, tried to hide there. The Heathcote coppers pulled up, found ‘em, pulled them over. Sat them in the car for a bit, while myself and Anthony Thomas tried to catch up and get there and in a position to arrest ‘em in relation to the fires. So I think they just sat there and sweated for a little while, wondering what was going on, and hoping it wasn't the worst-case scenario.

Voiceover: The listening device caught the men concocting a story to say that they had only stopped to look for four-wheel-drive tracks.

Justin Hagley then said…

[Recreated audio from police wiretap]

Justin Hagley (voice actor): “They can’t say that we lit them coz … they can’t prove that we lit ‘em”.

[Recreated audio ends and ominous music plays]

Voiceover: By this time, Andy was walking up to the driver’s side window.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: Again, just played it with a straight bat, ‘G'day, my name's Andy Heazlewood, Bendigo Police. You’re under arrest for a series of fires, bushfires, intentionally lit bushfires. You'll be taken to the Bendigo Police Station and interviewed in relation to that’.

Voiceover: Justin Hagley was the first to be interviewed. He intially denied being involved in lighting any fires.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: As the full weight of what the evidence was was put to Justin, he became more and more forthcoming into what he said. And in the end, it was said to him that, ‘Would it be fair to assume that you three had some involvement in all of these fires that we’ve spoken about?’ And I interviewed him in relation to all the fires going back to November.

And he said, ‘Yeah, that probably would be a fair thing’.

So in the end, I got the admission that I was hoping for. But it wouldn't have been without all the other steps that I’d taken along the way. There's no way he would have admitted to it if I'd just arrested him the first time that I spoke to him on the side of the road.

As much as Justin was forthcoming and he'd explain things, and try and come up with answers, and downplay what he'd done, and ultimately come clean and say, ‘Yep, that, that was probably all us’, Scott was just a ‘no’ guy.

He was just a ‘did not’, ‘was not’, ‘did not’. And we presented all the evidence to him, ‘It can't be anyone else but you’. He just, some people do that, they just shut down and they can't just quit or anything. They just refuse. ‘I'm not going to admit anything’, so just ‘no’. Anything the copper says is just ‘no’. They just deny.

And then Andrew. He became quite angry in the interview as we disclosed the weight of the evidence against him. And in the end, he just shut down the interview and it was obvious, he just told us the interview was over and he wasn't gonna answer anything else.

[Suspenseful music plays]

Voiceover: But all three men ended up making early guilty pleas. They were ultimately convicted at the county court of lighting 49 fires between the 8th of November 2019 and the 27th of March 2020.

When adding together the cost of the property damage and the cost to the CFA to put out the fires, the total cost to the community was more than three quarters of a million dollars.

Justin Hagley was sentenced to six years and four months in prison, with a minimum of four years and two months. Scott Hagley and Andrew Valli were both sentenced to six years in prison with a minimum of four years.

Stuart Niven said he and his community were incredibly thankful for the efforts of police.

Stuart Niven: It’s just fantastic to know that the police did put that effort in to try and catch these culprits and they did so yeah it’s really good.

Good on the police. They, they probably get knocked a lot for doing things, but then things like this that a lot of people don't hear about, yeah, fantastic effort by them to do all that.

Voiceover: Andy Heazlewood rates the investigation as the highlight of his career, but is quick to share the praise.

Det Sen Const Heazlewood: It was one of the best jobs, especially getting evidence so good that there was just no fight by defence.

This is me getting asked about this job because I'm the informant. But I'm really just the collector of things and put it together and go, ‘And how am I going to show things to someone?’

The people that actually do stuff, like Laura and Kayla, and everyone down at the arson chemists, they come up and they do these long jobs and help, they help me, they're the ones that are actually doing things, providing statements.

The uniformed police are speaking to people, people in the community are ringing up Crime Stoppers and providing intelligence. It's, it’s really impressive how police and the community can kind of get behind solving something as serious like this.

Now I am pretty happy that I got to the end of it and solved it because the alternative is not to solve it. And the alternative is that these three guys lit another series of fires in the summer of 2020 and 2021.

[Theme music starts and plays behind voiceover.]

Voiceover: Police Life: The Experts is a Victoria Police production.

Your host is Belinda Batty.

It was written by Jesse Wray-McCann.

It was produced by Jesse Wray-McCann and Lane Mihaljevic.

The senior producer was Ros Jaguar.

Voice acting in this episode by Jesse Wray-McCann, Lachlan Christie and Michael Teychenne.

Audio production and original music by Mat Dwyer.

Theme song by Veaceslav Draganov.

Executive produced by Beck Angel.

This podcast was created by the Media, Communications and Engagement Department at Victoria Police.

To learn more about the work of Victoria Police, go to police.vic.gov.au.