The Acre on Fire: The True Story of a Deadly Blaze, Junk Science, and a Journey for Justice

Summary

“Tragic, infuriating, impeccably researched…. [A] remarkable story, brilliantly told.” — John Grisham

A shocking story of fire science gone wrong and mob mentality run amok, when Victor Rosario, an immigrant in Lowell, Massachusetts, is wrongfully convicted following a deadly blaze and exonerated after 30 years in prison—from the New York Times bestselling author of Black Mass and Whitey.

The fire began on the first floor. No smoke alarms. No sprinkler system.

Ten or so residents escaped, but others could not see their way through the thick smoke. In a tiny bedroom on the first floor, a young mother draped herself like a blanket over her three children. In a rear stairwell, a couple held tightly to their two toddlers. Two hours later, eight corpses were found in the tenement turned tomb.

The fire that swept through the unassuming apartment building known as the Acre was the deadliest in the history of Lowell, Massachusetts, a mill town thirty miles northwest of Boston and a work destination for generations of immigrants. Responding along with dozens of firefighters were Lowell’s two crack arson investigators, Harold Waterhouse and William Gilligan. On inspection, the blackened remains spoke to them: arson. Their suspect: Victor Rosario, age 24, out-of-work, a drinker and drug user. Rosario just so happened to be there.

Convicted one year later of arson murder, Rosario was sentenced to life in prison. He insisted that he was innocent and that he’d actually been trying to help rescue people.

Decades later, award-winning veteran reporter Dick Lehr was teaching an investigative reporting clinic at Boston University and got a tip about the Rosario case. Lehr and his students reported for more than a year and uncovered shocking defects in the fire investigation, the fact that Rosario’s lawyer, an alcoholic, was in no shape to defend him, having been arrested for killing two elderly people while driving drunk, and that, in prison, Rosario had become a steady presence, a spiritual leader, and a marathon runner. Their reporting culminated in a front-page exposé in the Boston Globe in 2010 that set the stage for a state judge to throw out Rosario’s conviction. Rosario was finally set free after 32 years.

Now, in The Acre on Fire, Dick Lehr dramatically reconstructs and reexamines the case that has dogged him for more than a decade. He unravels the true and vexing story of Rosario’s wrongful incarceration and the junk fire science, lynch mob mentalities, and sensational press coverage that put him there.