Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [158]
The morning after the fire nineteen firefighters were sent to the hospital suffering burns or smoke inhalation. Finney was treated for burns, cuts, a gunshot wound, smoke inhalation, and a chipped tooth he’d incurred during his scuffle with Balitnikoff.
For twenty hours the fire raged, and after it was tapped, the Columbia Tower had a distinct tilt to it. One local newspaper columnist proposed that it be left that way and transformed into a tourist attraction.
During the fire Jerry Monahan gave a rambling confession to the medics who were treating his broken leg. He wanted to come clean in time for somebody to stop Balitnikoff, Tony, and the Lazenbys from killing Finney and his friends. Monahan didn’t seem to mind murdering two hundred strangers, but losing three people he knew bothered him no end, especially after having suffered guiltily through Gary Sadler’s emotional funeral a few days earlier. He’d admitted the Lazenby brothers had been inside the Bowman Pork fire giving bad directions to Sadler and Finney, that they’d taken an unconscious Sadler back into the building after Finney had carried him out.
Tony Finney turned state’s evidence, admitting he’d been desperate for money after a succession of gambling losses. Tony had always coveted the good life, and just to make sure he never got a piece of it, he’d gambled away most of his paychecks. As had the others, he’d done it for the money, tax-free and ankle-deep, as well as the promise, initially, that nobody would get hurt. After their first major fire resulted in Bill Cordifis’s death, they all realized they might well be prosecuted for murder—that was when denial, rationalization, and justification set in.
Gil Finney reluctantly told his son John that Sadler had visited him with theories about Monahan, and that he had breached Sadler’s confidence by telling Tony, who in turn must have told the others. Thus, the booby trap in Bowman Pork—intended to kill both Finney and Sadler.
For a few hours after they picked his body up off the street, Marion Balitnikoff was hailed by television news reporters outside the building as the second heroic firefighter who’d fallen to his death battling the Columbia Tower fire. It was the only glory he was to squeeze out of this.
Wrapped in a canvas tarp, Oscar Stillman’s body was found upstairs on fifty-eight. The most popular theory for why G. A. Montgomery had transported him up there was that he’d been planning to pitch him down the elevator shaft so it would look like an accident.
Paul Lazenby was found on sixty with a badly broken ankle. Michael Lazenby was picked up two days after the fire in L.A., waiting to board a Mexican Airlines flight to Mazatlán. Currently they were both in the King County jail, charged with the murder of Gary Sadler, the attempted murder of John Finney, and conspiracy to commit arson.
The day after the Columbia Tower fire was tapped, Charlie Reese gave a series of media interviews in which he attempted to fob off blame for the catastrophe on shady building contractors. Four days after the fire he resigned, saying he was going back to college to pursue a degree in social work, that he wanted to work with wayward teenage girls.
Later that week, Robert Kub came out with a public statement laying out what had really happened at Leary Way when he and Reese went inside to search. When reporters tried to contact Reese for his rebuttal, he’d already left town.
All in all, the Columbia Tower was the worst fire tragedy in Seattle history, the runner-up a 1943 plane crash in which a B-29 missed the runway at Boeing Field, crashed into the Frye Packing Plant, and killed thirty-two people.
In addition to Barney Spritzer, Stillman, Balitnikoff, and G. A. Montgomery, twenty-eight civilians, including building owner Patterson Cole, died, most in the elevator fiasco. Only one man survived the freight elevator, Norris Radford. His was a curious case, because a week later he managed to disappear from a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland,