I wrote about the Nancy Guthrie case, February 2026, and it got me into crime writing mode. I spent hours looking through old news about Niagara County and I would like to show how Niagara County had it's own version of the Zodiac Killer, who sent in complex clues, but it was never noticed. This goes beyond Niagara County and involves Buffalo and the Canadian side.
Exactly fifty years ago, rural Niagara County was terrorized by a serial arsonist. The arsonist targeted wooden structures and lumberyards and did a tremendous amount of damage, although he didn't seem intent on hurting anyone. There was an article about it in the New York Times, November 20, 1976. Remember that $9,500 was a lot of money then.
What finally happened is that the arsonist got a little bit too bold. In January 1978 he tried to torch two lumber companies in the north end of Niagara Falls. He got the first one but was caught at the second one, on Lockport Road. He had a scanner radio that could receive both police and fire department communications. This was in the news on January 17, 1978.
What I have found is that it went much further than this.
1969 was my first summer where I live now. One evening, from somewhere out in La Salle, was a towering column of smoke. There must have been no wind at all because the column of smoke went straight up into the sky. The news the next day revealed that it had been the River Road Lumber Company.
I see now that the cause of the fire must have been arson, by a game-playing arsonist. Someone had made two emergency calls, one that he had set fire to a restaurant and the other to a school. Then he made a third call that there was a fire in the basement of the lumber company. The police carefully checked the lumber company and nothing seemed out of place. But then, about two hours later, the lumber company really was burning. This was in the news on July 14, 1969 but was never connected to the later Niagara County Arsonist, who targeted many lumberyards including the final two described above.
There was an old school, Pacific Avenue School on Buffalo Ave between 71st and 72nd Streets, that had closed and then been converted into a restaurant. It burned around the beginning of 1977. This is just down the street from where the lumber company had been located. So the arsonist called before torching the lumber company that he had set fire to a restaurant and to a school and now a school that had turned into a restaurant had mysteriously burned. But this was never connected together.
Also around the beginning of 1977 were three major fires in downtown Niagara Falls. As with the lumber company and the school they were right down the street from each other. There was Levy Brothers Furniture, at Pine Avenue and 15th Street, and the Haeberle Plaza. The plaza fire was caused by arson which began with an explosion. Then there was a major fire on north Main Street, where the police station is now located.
What might have happened is that, with the rural arsons getting a lot of attention, the arsonist shifted his focus into the city of Niagara Falls, picking up where he left off with the River Road Lumber Company seven years before.
With that background now let's get to the deadly part.
The arsonist had called in that there was a fire in the basement of the River Road Lumber Company, before there really was a fire. The Haeberle Plaza arson, seven years later, would begin with an explosion. In the early morning of February 20, 1970, an explosion in the basement of the Sagamore Apartments building, at Main and Third Streets, started a fire that killed two elderly women but I cannot see that this was ever considered as arson. The building is just down the street from the Haeberle Plaza.
The Sagamore arson was a definite attempt to put people in danger. The building was full of elderly people and it was a very cold night so that if anyone had to rush to escape without a coat, they would be in danger of freezing. Maybe the arsonist couldn't get attention with property fires. When this still failed to get attention, he moved on to the next one.
The Sagamore was one of two apartment buildings that were connected together. The fire was prevented from spreading to the other building by an internal fire wall. In the following image from Google Earth the former Sagamore building is to the right and you can see that there is a narrow gap between the two buildings, although they are joined in the front.
A few weeks after the Sagamore fire came the worst fire of all. In the early morning of April 4, 1970, a terrible fire in Lockport killed six children. The children, from two related families, were sleeping in a house at 7 Mill Street. Their parents were next door at a bar-restaurant at 5 Mill Street, which was heavily damaged by the fire.
Both old structures were considered as substandard and the city was trying to vacate them. The following image, which I think was taken in the 1950s from the Mill Street Bridge, shows the restaurant in the foreground. The light colored house, just beyond the restaurant with the white car in front of it, is where the six children died (History Collection).
The cause of the fire was listed as electrical, due to improper wiring. But the fire happened at about 2:30 AM. An electrical fire is caused by the flow of electricity through improper or overloaded wiring. This means that an electrical fire is least likely to happen in the middle of the night because, at least in a house, that is when the least amount of current would be flowing.
There was a narrow gap between the two buildings and, at that gap, part of the lower outer wall of the house was completely burned away. This is obviously where the fire must have started. Since heat and flame goes upward it is extremely rare for the outer wall of a house to be burned through unless the fire burned for a long time, which this one didn't. This indicates that the fire started outside, in the narrow gap between the buildings.
The following illustration shows the house at 7 and the restaurant at 5 Mill Street. The red line shows where the fire started.
The narrow gap between the two buildings is reminiscent of the gap between the Sagamore and the adjoining apartment building. The fire was prevented from spreading to that building by an internal fire wall but this time the arsonist would solve that and the fire would spread from one building to the other. This was a clue that he had also set the Sagamore fire.
If it had been in the news that the city was trying to vacate these two properties then he might have thought that the house was vacant. There seems to have been mostly a break in the fires until they began again in earnest in April 1976. It is interesting that he killed six children and April 1976 would be the sixth anniversary of this fire. Maybe he was initially horrified at having killed six children but later decided to send clues as to what he had done with further fires. This ultimately got the article in the New York Times, described above.
I remember wondering in fourth grade, and then again in eleventh grade, why there were so many fires. The later fires didn't kill anyone but were more obviously caused by arson.
The final two arsons, at the lumberyards in January 1978 in the North End of Niagara Falls with the second being on Lockport Road as described above, were to convey that the arsonist had set the fire in Lockport that had spread from one building to the other. The Mill Street fire had been in the northernmost part of Lockport, Lowertown.
Just look at the following 1976 article. This article tells us what we need to know. The arsonist was sending clues with the fires during this period that he had set the deadly Mill Street fire. Unlike the Zodiac Killer he used the names of the locations of the fires, rather than sending in cryptograms.
The arson fires are heavily concentrated on Lockport Road. Why would there be such a concentration of fires on Lockport Road? There are five such fires listed in this article. With the later one where he was caught, as described above, that makes six fires on Lockport Road. Could it be to tell us that he was the one who killed the six children in Lockport?
The children in Lockport had been native Indians. The other streets where his targets were located were Shawnee, Erie and, Cayuga. These are native Indian tribes.
But then why would he target Miller Hardware and the Sanborn Milling Company? As clues to the fire that happened on Mill Street.
One unfortunate farmer was targeted twice, apparently at two different locations. He probably never imagined that he was being targeted because of his name, as a clue to Mill Street (NYT article).
His favorite targets were 84 Lumber stores. Could this be a clue that he had killed 8 people, six in Lockport and two at the Sagamore, and also that the Mill Street fire had been 8 weeks after the Sagamore, on 4/4?
These early fires were going on at the same time as the Zodiac Killer, in California, and could have been influenced by that, in this sending of complex clues.
With all of these clues about what he had done, there must be some as to who he was. He might have targeted lumber yards and wooden structures because the nearest intersection to where he lived was Candlewood. He might have targeted the site on Quarry Road because the street where he lived ended at Stone Road.
He let himself be seen, sometimes showing up in bars and talking about the fires and correctly predicting which targets would be next although not admitting to starting them.
Then we have the physical geography clues. Six of the sites described above have the target adjacent to a waterway and a bridge over the waterway. This could not be a coincidence. In the days before the Internet he must have spent a lot of time with maps and this gave him a strong sense of physical geography. Images from Google Earth.
In the initial two calls before the River Road Lumber Company fire in 1969, the caller claimed to have set fire to a restaurant and then a school. The sites of these are indicated by the two red lines in the following image, both adjacent to Bergholtz Creek and the 91st Street Bridge over it. The road parallel to the creek is Cayuga Drive.
There is also numerical clues. The River Road Lumber Company fire happened on July 13, 7/13. 7 x 13 = 91 and 7 + 13 + 91 = 111. But he made two calls before the lumber company fire so it was 222 days from the lumber company to the Sagamore fires. From there it was 8 weeks to the Mill Street fire on 4/4, as described above. Both show exactly the same pattern of using both addition and multiplication, and the same with 84 Lumber.
The site of the River Road Lumber Company is indicated by the red line, adjacent to Cayuga Creek and the La Salle Expressway bridge over it.
The former Sagamore Apartments building is shown in the upper right by the red dot on the white roof, adjacent to the Niagara River and the Rainbow Bridge.
A reason that he might have targeted the Sagamore is in preparation for the Mill Street fire, because there is a very similar building to the Sagamore in Lockport, both in structure and being centrally located. The Mill Street Bridge is just down the street from this building in about exactly the same way that the Rainbow Bridge is just down the street from the former Sagamore building. Again we see this "just down the street" pattern between fire sites.
The arsonist lived near Eighteen Mile Creek and that might be part of why he used waterways near the fire sites as clues. The Sagamore is the most distant of the U.S. sites from where he lived, and it was about exactly eighteen miles from where he lived.
The red line shows the location of the wooden restaurant structure at 5 Mill Street in Lockport, adjacent to the canal and the Mill Street Bridge over it.
The red line across the park in the upper right of the following image is the site of the former Pacific Avenue School, later turned into a restaurant, adjacent to the Niagara River and the Grand Island Bridge.
The fire site on north Main Street is shown in the following image by the red line. It is positioned relative to the Whirlpool and Michigan Central Bridges in exactly the same way.
It is also interesting how the lumberyard targeted in the final fire, on Lockport Road when the arsonist was caught, was positioned in exactly the same way relative to the Hyde Park Boulevard Bridge, indicated by the red line over two white roofs. The bridge is indicated by the yellow line. But this bridge was over railroad tracks, rather than a waterway.
This is to tell us that he killed the six children in Lockport in one of the fires relative to a bridge. There were also six fires on Lockport Road.
The Zodiac Killer couldn't have done the clues any better than this. But it was never recognized. The arsonist was showing how brilliant he was and the fires unfortunately had to happen to display that brilliance. This was before electronic calculators were common so he must have figured all of this out on paper.
THE CANADIAN SIDE
The arsonist visited a tavern in Canada, as described above. There was once a spring around Dufferin Islands where natural gas emerged from the ground. It was known as the Burning Spring.
In the late 1960s there was a museum on the high ground above the falls called the Burning Spring Wax Museum. It was part of the general tourist district. My parents took me there. It had scenes of the history of the area. There was a model of the Burning Spring with a flame.
The museum was near the observation tower that was much more prominent before taller hotels were built around it. It is now known as the Tower Hotel. Image from the Wikipedia article "Tower Hotel (Niagara Falls)".
On June 5, 1969, the museum burned. I didn't give much thought to what caused the fire, maybe the flame had gotten out of control. But now I see the same kind of numeracy described above, involving the dates and the number of days between fires.
Next to the Burning Spring Wax Museum was the Loretto Academy, although there was a parking lot between the two where a hotel is now located. This was the site of a historic fire in Niagara Falls. The Loretto Academy had burned on January 10, 1938.
It was 38 days from the Burning Spring fire to the River Road Lumber Company fire. We saw the doubling above so that it was 222 days from the River Road Lumber Company fire to the Sagamore fire. The same kind of doubling can be seen here. The Loretto Academy fire occurred on January 10, 1/10. The Sagamore fire occurred on 2/20. Again this might be something that was influenced by the cryptograms of the Zodiac Killer.
The way the arsonist used dates, it doesn't matter whether the month or the day is put first.
The Burning Spring Wax Museum had burned exactly two years before, in 1967. The two years are another indication of this doubling. On the other side of the Loretto Academy was the Mount Carmel Shrine. That burned later in 1967, on November 25.
This use of an anniversary resonates with the later fires apparently beginning in April 1976, which was the sixth anniversary of the death of the six children.
The Burning Spring Wax Museum fires were one day short of two years apart. The 1967 fire was on June 6 but the 1969 fire was on June 5. June 5 was necessary to get the numbers to work out for the River Road Lumber and Sagamore fires because the fire at the Loretto Academy had been in 1938.
The name of the Burning Spring Wax Museum obviously fits into this scenario and the fire and smoke would be very visible during the tourist season from both sides of the border.
I wonder if there might have been a rock music influence because the 1967 Burning Spring fire was when the song that might have launched psychedelic rock, "Light My Fire" by The Doors, was popular.
The following three images are from Google Earth. In the first image the falls are at right. The Loretto Academy is indicated by the red line and the site of the Burning Spring Wax Museum by the yellow line. Mount Carmel is indicated by the purple line.
The following image, from a higher scale, shows the site of the Burning Spring Wax Museum as the red line at bottom left and the Sagamore as the red line at upper right. The two are positioned roughly the same relative to the Rainbow Bridge.
This image shows, by the red line, that there was once a north wing to the Mount Carmel Shrine, which was destroyed by the 1967 fire.
A great urban fire occurred in Toronto occurred on the night of August 28, 1969. The glow of the fire could be seen from Niagara Falls.
The Toronto fire began at the Oliver Lumber Company and spread from there. Near where the arsonist lived, and the site of some of his fires, is the city of North Tonawanda. The nickname of North Tonawanda is "The Lumber City", because of the logs that used to be brought in on the Erie Canal to be sawn into lumber. The main street in North Tonawanda is Oliver Street. There were many 84 Lumber stores in the area, which seemed to be the arsonist's favorite targets. This Toronto fire happened 84 days after the June 5 fire at the Burning Spring Wax Museum. This resonates with how the Mill Street fire came 8 weeks after the Sagamore fire, on 4/4.
The site of this major Toronto fire is now the Walter Saunders Memorial Park. Image from Google Earth.
Notice that the dates of three of the four Canadian fires multiply or add to 36. This shows the same use of both multiplication and addition.
The 1967 fire at the Burning Spring Wax Museum happened on June 6. 6 x 6 = 36.
The 1967 fire at the Mount Carmel Shrine happened on November 25. 11 + 25 = 36.
The 1969 fire in Toronto happened on August 28. 8 + 28 = 36.
The Canadian fire that doesn't equal 36 is the 1969 fire at the Burning Spring Wax Museum, which happened one day early on June 5. This was necessary because this was the start of the other line of numbers, involving the River Road Lumber Company, the Sagamore and, Mill Street, as described above. The adjacent Loretto Academy had burned in 1938 so the River Road Lumber Company was scheduled to burn 38 days after the Burning Spring. The River Road Lumber Company fire had to be on July 13, 7/13, to fit with the nearby 91st Street Bridge as described above.
The arsonist thus "owed" one day because the 1969 fire at the Burning Spring Wax Museum had been a day too early to amount to 36. So what might have happened is that the Mroz Lumber Company, in Buffalo, burned on September 28, 9/28. This was one day over amounting to 36.
The site of the Mroz Lumber Company is shown by the two red lines in the following image from Google Earth. We see the familiar adjacent bridge pattern, the railroad bridge over Broadway. The street to the left is Lathrop Street.
To show the debt relationship with the Burning Spring Wax Museum fire, this site is adjacent to the towering Central Terminal in the same way that the Burning Spring site is adjacent to the observation tower described above. Image from Google Street View.
So if we took a day from the Buffalo fire and added it to the 1969 Burning Spring Wax Museum fire then both would equal 36 like the other fires. Remember that the Zodiac Killer was in the news around this time and moving a day, from one fire to another like this, resembles the Zodiac Killer's cryptogram where it appears that the characters must be moved around before the puzzle is solved.
So we have two numeric lines in the early fires, from 1967 to 1970. These are the 36 Line and the River Road-Sagamore-Mill Street Line. The two lines meet at the 1969 fire at the Burning Spring Wax Museum, on June 5.
The later fires, from 1976-78, were about names, rather than numbers, as clues to the 1970 fire on Mill Street that had killed the six children. The adjacent bridge pattern is seen in both early and later fires. Just as the Zodiac Killer has been sending in cryptograms during the time of the early fires, the Son of Sam was in the news for sending in names as clues during the time of the later fires.
WILLIAMSVILLE NY
There used to be a concert venue in Williamsville NY called, of all things, The Inferno. There was also another entertainment venue on the site, either an amusement park or a casino. On the site was the waterfall on Ellicott Creek. Image from Google Street View.
On September 23, 1968, The Inferno lived up to it's name and was destroyed in a massive fire. Nearly five years later, on September 8, 1973, the rest of the entertainment venue was destroyed in another great fire. The site is now Glen Park. The white water of the falls is visible. Image from Google Earth.
I cannot see that these fires were ever considered as arson but has anyone ever noticed that there is an adjacent mill, built in 1811 with the 1811 prominently displayed and the fires were 1811 days apart? The first image is from Google Street View.
A SCOTTISH NAME
We have seen how the fires contained all kinds of clues about who the arsonist was. But I wondered if there was still more to it.
The most puzzling was why this all seemed to start with the Loretto Academy on the Canadian side. The arsonist seems to have set three fires around it and it was itself the site of a historic fire. But it was far away from where he lived and across the border.
Then there were the relationships between the fires. There were three definite kinds. 1) the numbers in the date of the fire. 2) the number of days between fires and, 3) the name relationships, particularly Mill. What was interesting is how the three kinds of relationships are woven together.
Then there was the mystery of why there was a bridge adjacent to or near to so many of the fires, usually over water but sometimes over rail tracks. What did this mean? Since everything else about this seems to be loaded with meaning, this must mean something.
Finally there was this "just down the street" pattern that was seen in so many of the relationships between the fires.
But the answer is simple. The arsonist was trying to tell us, in the form of these complex clues, that he had a Scottish name.
The most famous place in Scotland is the Royal Mile. Edinburgh Castle, where the king originally lived, is at one end and Holyroodhouse Palace, which was built later and was the royal residence until Scotland joined Britain in 1707, is at the other end. The Royal Mile is just over a mile.
In the following image, from Google Earth, the red line at the left is Edinburgh Castle and the line at the right is Holyroodhouse Palace. The Royal Mile is the street that runs between the two.
This is a pic that I took of along the Royal Mile, from the western end near the castle looking eastward.
Edinburgh Castle, the original center of Scotland, is on an elevation above it's surroundings. Three images from Google Street View.
The Loretto Academy, although not a castle or fortification, is also on an elevation in a very similar way. This, along with the site of the Burning Spring Wax Museum and the Mount Carmel Shrine is on the highest elevation in Niagara Falls just as Edinburgh Castle is on the highest elevation in Edinburgh. The Loretto Academy represents Edinburgh Castle. The building to the upper left, with the red roof, is the Mount Carmel Shrine. Image from Google Street View.
INFLUENCES
There was a major urban fire in Lockport on December 22, 1960, during Christmas shopping. The arsonist would have been in his early teens at the time. I think he was influenced by this fire and the fires described above in downtown Niagara Falls NY and Toronto were attempts to replicate it, by getting the fire to spread from one building to another.
One thing that I have never seen written about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, in 1963, is that, not far from the site of the assassination, lived an eight-year-old boy named John Hinckley Jr., who would later attempt a presidential assassination himself. Right in the middle of the extensive Niagara County arson fires of 1976 lived an eight-year-old boy named Timothy McVeigh.
For more about crime see "Insights Into Major Crimes", September 2024.
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