Painstaking search for six bodies after an Annapolis mansion fire is finally over

Owners Don and Sandra Pyle and four of their grandchildren are unaccounted for after flames consumed the house.

The Boone grandchildren feared killed by an Annapolis fire, from top left: Wes, 6, and Charlotte, 8, the children of Clint Boone and his ex-wife, Eve Morrison; and Lexi , 8, and Katie, 7, children of Randy and Stacey Boone. Family photos

The painstaking search finally came to an end Monday: the bodies of four children and their grandparents all claimed from the charred remains of an Annapolis mansion.

For six days, dozens of firefighters, investigators and even police recruits sifted through the ash and ruin of the 16,000-square-foot shell. Amid the wreckage, two blackened brick chimneys towered and teetered above them. A pair of crumbling turrets were all that illustrated what the waterfront home had been before last week’s inferno: a modern-day castle.

Aided by cadaver dogs, the 50 or so team members worked on their hands and knees, often laboring through 12-hour shifts in rain, snow and freezing temperatures. In a structure the size of seven average single-family houses, they shoveled up concrete, charred wood, ash and sludge — bucket by bucket.

Hope never drove their efforts. This was a group gathered to recover, not rescue.
Presumed dead are the mansion’s wealthy owners, Don Pyle, 56, and his wife, Sandra, 63, as well as their grandchildren, the four Boone kids — Lexi, 8, and Katie, 7, along with their first cousins Charlotte, 8, and Wes, 6.

With the bodies retrieved, the intense excavation at the site will wind down over the next two days as investigators shift their focus to reviewing evidence and analyzing the possible cause and origin of the fire, said special agent Dave Cheplak, a spokesman for the Baltimore office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
Authorities hope to announce preliminary findings from the state medical examiner’s office sometime this week.

Though the fire’s cause remains a mystery, the discovery of the final body could expedite the investigation. The presence of undiscovered remains — especially in such an immense space — had further complicated the probe into what happened.

“The pictures and the description of the house just don’t do justice to the size of the task,” said Capt. Russell L. Davies Jr., Anne Arundel County Fire Department spokesman. “Until you see how far it is spread out and how massive the operation, it’s hard to get a good understanding.”

The fire began with a sleepover. On Jan. 18, the four Boone children went to stay with their grandparents because they didn’t have school the following day. The Pyles took them to Medieval Times at the Arundel Mills mall, where they watched knights joust before going back to their own castle.

Early the next morning, a home alarm alerted 911 that smoke had been detected on the mansion’s first and second floors. The four-alarm fire quickly ravaged the home, which did not have a sprinkler system. It was built in 2005, four years before Anne Arundel required sprinklers in new residential homes.

‘One-of-a-kind fire’

The fire was one of Maryland’s most devastating in years. Even experienced fire experts struggled to recall a comparable residential blaze in the region.

“A one-of-a-kind house and a one-of-a-kind fire,” said Gregg A. Hine, a recently retired senior special agent with the ATF.

Hine said he understood why it took investigators nearly a week to recover all of the bodies.
“Everything in there has the same appearance,” he said. “It’s oftentimes very difficult to pick out a burned body in the debris.”

Hine recalled fire scenes in which he had stood in small rooms with two other searchers but only one person could spot the remains.

At scenes where no bodies are present, investigators can more aggressively use mini-front-end loaders and other machinery to zero in on where the blaze started.

“While we’re trying to locate a missing victim, we’re doing everything by hand,” Davies said. “It’s just very labor intensive.”

Fire officials have no special device or high-tech shortcut to locate remains, Hine said. The best way to find them hasn’t changed for decades: cadaver dogs.

“They’re not something that you use that often,” said Hine, president of the investigative firm FirePoint Group. “But when you need them, you need them.”

Even with the dogs, though, investigators may struggle to find a body’s exact location, Hine said. Because remains are often buried beneath tons of wreckage, the scent of them can leak out — and be detected by the canines — through air pockets in entirely different rooms.

Pinpointing the cause

With the final body’s discovery, fire officials can now turn all of their attention to the cause of the blaze.

Typically, Hine said, investigators work from the “outside in,” first analyzing areas that are more intact and slowly moving toward the blaze’s potential origin.

Computer modeling can help determine where flames ignite or smoke spreads, said Dan Heenan, supervisor of the ATF national response team that has been assisting Anne Arundel at the scene.

Investigators can also use specialty software that provides 360-degree “forensic mapping,” which allows them to reconstruct a building’s layout in extreme detail.

All that made the Pyle home impressive — decorative marble, tall stone chimneys, brick walls — also make the work more difficult and dangerous, fire officials said. The mansion’s collapse left sharp nails, splintered wood and metal shards everywhere. Investigators could take a wrong step and fall into a pit of water used to extinguish the fire.

“Everywhere you go, you have to be cautious about what you’re doing,” Heenan said.
Investigators are using backhoes and cranes to dig out wreckage and move seven-ton steel beams. They’re shoving piles of rubble onto giant metal pans, which then get sifted through mesh screens for an even finer review. Nothing gets overlooked, including candles, cigarette butts or anything else that could have ignited the conflagration.

“When you’re digging a scene, no matter the scale and scope, you’re looking for these very small artifacts that usually survive a fire,” Heenan said.

Members of the ATF national response team work all over the world, often searching for bodies as they investigate the cause of fires. In one horrifying case, Heenan worked on a prison fire in Honduras where 371 people died after an inmate was smoking and ignited his bedding.

“For me, personally, the retrieval of a child is the hardest,” he said. “I have three daughters, and it does affect me more than others.”

Counselors have been available in Anne Arundel to talk with crew members who might need help. But investigators are also experienced professionals, and for many, they are simply doing their jobs. 

“Any hardships people endured during the course of the work,” Cheplak said, “is nothing compared to the hardship that the families and their loved ones have endured.”