Around 1:30 in the morning on July 25, Yvonne McManus was awakened by an urgent call from a family friend who lived two doors down from her mother in Fanwood, N.J.
“He told me her house was on fire,” Ms. McManus said. “He says he doesn’t know if she’s in there, but he opened her bedroom door, and he got burned.”
Ms. McManus, who lived nearby, raced over, but her mother, Virginia Cranwell, had been found dead in her second-floor bedroom. Ms. McManus saw the family friend, William Ahle, a retired correction officer, before he was taken to the hospital. “I gave him a big hug and everything,” Ms. McManus said on Wednesday.
“I did not know he was a murderer.”
But according to Union County prosecutors, that is what Mr. Ahle was. They said on Wednesday that he set the fire that killed Ms. Cranwell, 82, his neighbor for more than 30 years on Kempshall Terrace in the little town an hour west of New York City. He has been charged with first-degree murder, burglary and aggravated arson.
In the days after Ms. Cranwell’s death, Mr. Ahle, 70, was celebrated in Fanwood.
“Our guy’s a hero,” one neighbor, Richie Purawski, told WABC-TV at the time. “Not everybody would do that.” Mr. Ahle’s son, Matt Ahle, told WABC that his father had been out walking his dog when he noticed the fire and that he had gone into Ms. Cranwell’s house through her open garage door.
But looking back, Ms. McManus said, “nothing made sense.”
“They said the fire was contained in the bedroom, that it started right in front of her bedroom door and she was trapped in the bedroom,” she said. “In fact, someone from the fire or the police told me at the time, ‘Your mom’s house must have been really insulated — it was such a hot fire and it didn’t spread to anywhere in the house.’”
Prosecutors have not offered a motive for Ms. Cranwell’s killing, and Ms. McManus cannot imagine one. “This was someone that was supposed to be a friend for all these years,” she said.
After the fire, Ms. McManus spent months overseeing the reconstruction of her mother’s home, a two-story tan house with brown shutters and a little garden out front filled with bright flowers, statues of animals and rocks that her mother had gathered one by one from the side of a road a few towns over. She ran into Mr. Ahle regularly. “He never reached out to me once to say ‘I’m sorry about the loss of your mom,’” she said.
Union County prosecutors said Mr. Ahle was being held at Middlesex County Jail, 25 miles from the Union County Jail, where according to his Facebook page he was once a sergeant. They did not respond to questions about whether he has a lawyer.
Ms. McManus said on Wednesday that she had last seen Mr. Ahle a few weeks earlier. “He pulled up next to my car,” she said. “I was in my car at Mom’s house looking for the lockbox key code, and he pulled up to me. He was just asking questions about Mom’s house, the landscaping and who owns it now — not a single question about how are you feeling.”
At that point, Ms. McManus said, she believed her mother had been murdered, and she soon left the state.
“I had to move,” she said. “It wasn’t safe for me.”
Andy Newman writes about New Yorkers facing difficult situations, including homelessness, poverty and mental illness. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
The post A Mysterious Fire, a Helpful Neighbor and a Murder Charge appeared first on New York Times.
