Category: Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Records

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A couple years ago, I took a detour from my Ronald Tammen research to investigate the July 12, 1973, fire that consumed the sixth floor—and the military records that were stored there—at the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) in St. Louis, Missouri. Based on redacted records from the FBI’s investigation, I hazarded a theory that a 23-year-old Vietnam veteran who’d been honorably discharged due to psychiatric issues had probably started the fire by accident after smoking a cigarette on the sixth floor. I felt this way because the veteran—Terry Gene Davis—wasn’t at work on the day in which the case was going before the grand jury, which happened to be Halloween 1973, and he’d shot and killed himself one day later. I pointed to other evidence that I felt was ironclad as well, the strongest being that someone had written the grand jury’s ruling—“no bill,” or insufficient evidence to indict or investigate further—at the bottom of the memo discussing Terry’s suicide.

Well, guess what? I now have more info, and I’ll be revising my theory. One change is major, one change is a little more nuanced, and, although one part of my theory appears to be holding firm, it’s a lot more complicated than I’d originally thought.

The new info comes to us by way of William Elmore (he goes by Bill), a no-nonsense Air Force veteran who was working as a custodian on the sixth floor of the NPRC at the time of the fire. Bill has gone on to build a formidable career helping fellow veterans. At one time, he ran a small business in which he helped veterans obtain the benefits and services they deserved by locating the necessary paperwork. He’s a founder of the National Coalition of Homeless Veterans. He was an associate administrator of the Small Business Administration, where he oversaw the Office of Veterans’ Business Development. He’s a big deal. 

Bill knew Terry Davis pretty well. While Bill wouldn’t say they were the “best of buddies,” they were coworkers. They were also neighbors. Both men were renting cabins on a small road overlooking Twin Islands Lake, a scenic area that’s one county over from St. Louis County. Terry’s cabin was next door to Bill’s. They’d see each other both on and off the clock—working the 4 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. shift at the NPRC and occasionally during their off hours—though both were also quite busy. As part of the federal government’s Veterans’ Readjustment Program, which helped both of them get their jobs at the NPRC, they were required to take college courses during the daytime. Terry was taking classes at Meramec Community College in Kirkwood, Missouri. Bill took his courses at Forest Park Community College in St. Louis.

Sadly, it was Bill who’d discovered Terry’s body on November 5, 1973, several days after Terry’s suicide. 

Bill’s recollection of the night of the fire is seared in his memory.

At a little after midnight on July 12, 1973, shortly before the end of their shift, Bill and Terry were standing with other custodians at the guard’s stand near the building’s main entrance waiting to sign out. Custodians and others whose shifts were ending weren’t permitted to leave the building until precisely 12:30 a.m., so they would congregate at one of two doors—the main entrance, which was on the second floor on the west side of the building, and the so-called back entrance, which was on the first floor on the east side. (If your brain, like mine, shuts down as soon as someone starts throwing around directions and asking you to visualize everything in your mind, I’m including a simple diagram of the building that was included with the FBI’s FOIA response documents, with some additional details I’ve provided in red.) 

According to the FBI documents, at roughly 12:15 a.m., Bill and Terry were standing at the second floor entrance on the building’s west side when they learned about the fire. As Bill tells it, a guy on a small motorcycle had shown up at the main entrance and was frantically trying to open the doors. When a guard opened the outside door to find out what the man was trying to say, Bill remembers hearing him say that the fifth floor of the south wall of the building was on fire.

As it so happens, that same motorcycle man had ostensibly flagged a guard who was in the parking lot inspecting a government car and told him about the fire “on the southwest corner of the Records Center.” With that news, the guard got into the car and drove to the southwest corner of the building. The building itself was enormous—728 feet long from west to east and 282 feet wide from north to south. Peering upward, he guesstimated that the fire started about a third of the way down the building’s south side, and that it was burning “in an eastward direction.” He noticed flames “shooting”—his word—out of the windows directly above the computer cabinets on the fifth floor. “The blaze encompassed three small windows in the top of the sixth floor,” he told an FBI special agent afterward. The guard deduced that the fire was on the sixth floor.

But inside the building, there was still a lot of confusion about where the fire was. According to Bill, one source of confusion was that all of the exhaust fans in the building had been turned off except for the ones on the fifth floor. This caused smoke to billow out of the fifth-floor windows, and was very likely the reason the guard had seen flames there as well. Smoke was pouring into the other floors too, including the fourth floor computer area and corridors and the elevator shafts. The smoke on the fifth floor was so bad that one person said that “you could barely see two feet in front of your face.” 

At roughly 12:17 a.m.—after the motorcycle man had banged on the front doors and before the first fire fighters had arrived—Terry, acting on impulse, had decided to run up a stairwell to the sixth floor and investigate, a response he later described to a special agent of the FBI during their investigation. He wanted to “go take a look at the fire,” he told him, and he took the stairwell closest to the guard stand, which was near the northwest corner of the building. A detail that Terry didn’t mention (or that the special agent neglected to write down) was that Bill had decided to follow Terry. Bill was thinking that, when they reached the top of the stairs, he could grab an emergency fire hose hanging on a wall beyond the stairwell door to fight the fire. At least that was his plan.

Little did Bill know that, by then, the fire had already grown fangs. It would require way more than one fire hose to tame it. 

After arriving on the sixth floor about a minute behind Terry, Bill opened the door that separated the stairwell from a lobby-type area where the escalator and freight elevator were located. Bill was now facing a set of double doors that opened into a hallway. The hallway was the main dividing line between the office area (on the hallway’s north side) from the file area (on its south side), where the military records were kept. Bill vividly remembers seeing Terry running through the double doors, his eyes fixed on the stairwell door that Bill was coming through. A look of terror was on Terry’s face. A wall of smoke was moving faster than he could run. 

Terry’s expression is what stands out most in Bill’s memory. Whatever else Terry might have said or done that night didn’t really register with him. It was the look on his face that he’ll always remember.

I think we’ll do the rest of this as a Q&A:

You said you have a major change to make regarding your theory. 

Indeed I did.

What did you get wrong?

It’s rather humongous. It has to do with a custodian who, in the ensuing weeks and months, was talking freely and openly with fellow custodians about having set the fire. When the U.S. attorney presented his case to the federal grand jury on October 31, he produced a signed confession from that person along with the statements of five witnesses who had heard him claiming to have started the fire. At first, none of the witnesses had believed him. He had a reputation for running off at the mouth to get attention. But then, as his claims grew more daring, they wondered if he might be telling the truth. 

In my earlier post, I’d presumed that Terry must have been the bold talker in addition to being the sixth-floor smoker. I thought he was the one who was telling the outrageous stories, though I still thought the fire was an accident.

But according to Bill, the person who was making those claims wasn’t Terry. 

It was a Black man who happened to be physically and cognitively impaired. 

So, mystery solved, right? It was the disabled man who’d been owning up to it all along when he signed the confession.

I wouldn’t say that. 

Why not? He admitted it.

Let’s call him “BT,” short for Bold Talker. 

You know what’s weird about BT’s signed confession? The confession that he signed doesn’t match any of the stories that the five witnesses described. Not a one. When BT was talking to his coworkers, he never described the act of lighting up a cigarette and having himself a smoke. The way he told the story, he’d carried some matches up to the sixth floor—in some tellings, he found them on the first floor; in other tellings, he’d brought them from home—and lit those matches, even going so far as to purposely light one of the file boxes on fire. It was all about the matches, not the cigarette, which, truth be told, is the whole point of smoking. The way BT told it, he did it out of boredom—“for something to do.” He actually said those words to one witness. 

But the confession that BT signed told a different story. In the signed confession, he discusses bringing a cigarette from home, which he stowed in his shirt pocket. He said he brought a book of matches too. He then said that he went to the sixth floor and smoked his cigarette “pretty far” and, when he was done, he used a screw hole in one of the shelving units to put it out. He put the hot end in the hole and he tossed the cigarette butt and spent match on the floor. He didn’t think either one was still hot. He really, truly, honestly did not mean to do it and he felt horrible about it.

But Bill has serious doubts about BT’s signed confession. He always has.

Why?

Years after the fire, he’s not exactly sure when, Bill was at the St. Louis Airport talking to a fellow passenger when he noticed BT walking through the corridor.

“Excuse me,” he told his friend. “I need to talk to that man.”

Bill walked up to BT, they probably exchanged hellos, and then he said, “I have just one question for you. Did you smoke?”

BT’s response was “Nope.”

That’s right. BT wasn’t a smoker.

“None of us had ever seen him smoke,” Bill said to me.

So that’s rather huge, wouldn’t you say? It certainly casts doubt on the crux of BT’s confession. It seems as if the FBI didn’t have a lot of faith in that confession either though. Even though they had a detailed confession signed by BT himself, they claimed in a document dated November 6, 1973, that it was something that Terry had told them that was the strongest evidence implicating BT. In most law enforcement circles, a signed confession would supersede hearsay any day, but there was something about BT’s confession that didn’t feel like a slam dunk to them. Obviously, the federal grand jury wasn’t overwhelmed either, since they decided there wasn’t enough evidence to charge BT with a crime or to investigate further.

But there are other weirdnesses about BT’s confession.

What kind of weirdnesses?

–The car

In his signed confession, BT says that he signed out at 12:30 a.m. then walked up the escalators “which were turned off at the time” to the second floor entrance on the west side “where my car was parked.” 

BT had a physical disability that affected his left leg and foot as well as his right arm and hand in a pronounced way. From what I’ve gathered, and to its credit, the state of Missouri didn’t automatically disqualify someone who had both an upper-body and lower-body limb impairment from obtaining a driver’s license in those days. But there would be restrictions. Bill doesn’t remember whether or not BT drove, but he told me that, if he did, his car would’ve had to have been an automatic. A manual transmission would require the use of his left foot to press the clutch when switching gears as well as the use of his right arm and hand to change gears. To Bill, BT’s disability would have made those movements extremely difficult if not impossible. Even an automatic transmission would require some use of his right arm and hand to switch from “drive” to “reverse” to “neutral to “park.”

And although I don’t know the degree to which he was cognitively impaired, he would’ve had to pass a written test as well as a driving test. He would likely have had to provide signed documents from his doctor plus perhaps others who could attest to his capabilities as well. For these reasons, we can’t be at all sure whether BT was able to drive, or if he used an alternative mode of transportation to and from work, be it public transportation, another driver, or a combination of both.

–His confession doesn’t match his earlier statement

Another weirdness is that BT’s signed confession doesn’t match his original statement to the FBI regarding his actions that night.

As we just discussed, in his signed confession, BT says that he signed out on the first floor and then walked up the escalator to the second floor, where he exited to the lot where his car was parked. Here are his exact words:

“At about 12:10 a.m., I went down to the first floor, by the lobby on the east end of the building to wait for time to go home at 12:30 p.m. [SIC: should be 12:30 a.m.]. Some other custodial employees were there too, and we talked for awhile. I then signed out at about 12:30 a.m. on July 12, 1973, and was walking up the escalators which were turned off at the time. I went to the west entrance where my car was parked, and I noticed firetrucks outside. I smelled smoke as I had gone down the corridor, and it occurred to me that maybe I had started a fire, that the cigarette might not have been out.”

But in his earlier statement, which was conducted on July 16, 1973, the FBI summarized BT’s account this way:

“[BLANK] finished his work at about 12:00 Midnight and went to the locker room to clean up. At this time, no one had mentioned anything about a fire. At about 12:15 A.M., July 12, 1973, he went to the second floor to sign out. While he was standing in line waiting to sign out, someone had mentioned that there was a fire upstairs. No mention of the size or exact location was made. [BLANK] stated that he assumed the fire was small and was under control. He thought no more about it, and signed out and left at 12:30 A.M.”

So on July 16, 1973, he said that he went to the locker room near the east entrance on the first floor to clean up and then went straight to the second floor and waited in line to sign out there. However, in his October 12, 1973, confession, he said that he’d signed out on the first floor and then walked up the escalator to leave by way of the west entrance, where his car was supposedly parked. Those aren’t the sorts of details that a person would lie about, since the FBI could have easily checked the two logs to find out which one was accurate. Besides, Bill says that it makes no sense that he would sign out at the east entrance on the first floor and then walk up the escalator to exit the main entrance, since he would have had to sign out on the second floor too. The guards at both entrances would require each person to sign out before they exited the door.

Also, in his confession, he only started smelling smoke as he was walking down the corridor. But in July, he said that “someone had mentioned that there was a fire upstairs” as he was waiting in line to sign out on the 2^nd floor.

Interestingly, in his July statement, BT had this to add: “[BLANK] stated it is his opinion that it would be very difficult for an outsider to get into the NPRC-M [NPRC Military Branch] but that it would be easy for any NPRC-M employee to move around freely to any area.”

That’s not something a person who worked inside the building would say if he thought he might have caused the fire, whether accidentally or on purpose.

Lastly, let’s think about BT’s disability again. His left leg had little to no mobility, which made walking for him extremely challenging, since his right leg did most of the work. Custodians were required to take their carts to a designated room on the first floor, near the east entrance, at the end of their shift. If BT could drive, why in the world would he park his car on the west side of the building, which was 728 feet long—well over two football fields away? Why not park his car in the lot on the east side, which was nearest the area where custodians stowed their carts and cleaned up? The only way it makes sense to me is if BT walked to the west entrance after dropping off his cart because that’s where he had to go in order to catch his ride home.

These discrepancies lead me to wonder if BT’s confession was someone else’s story, which he’d been coerced into signing as his own, or if it had been made up out of whole cloth, which, again, he’d been coerced into signing.

With most names being redacted in the FBI documents, how can you be sure that you’re reading BT’s statement from July 1973 and not someone else’s?

In his signed confession, BT described his job as “cleaning the escalators between the first and the sixth floor.” Bill also confirmed that BT was responsible for cleaning the escalators.

When I reviewed all of the custodians’ statements from July 1973, with the exception of one extremely vague, brief statement, I was able to pinpoint where in the building each person had worked on the night of July 11. There is only one statement in which the custodian said that he worked on the escalators. For this reason, I believe this to be BT’s statement. Also, the person’s physical characteristics that aren’t redacted are a perfect match between the two statements—with one small exception. BT had lost 1/2 pound since their conversation in July.

For comparison, here’s his entire statement from July and here’s his confession from October.

And here’s a comparison of the physical descriptions for each.

Oh, and by the way? BT doesn’t mention a car in his July statement. He just says that “he signed out and left at 12:30 A.M.”

How does this affect your theory on Terry Gene Davis?

This is where things get a little more nuanced. I can’t prove that Terry Gene Davis was the accidental source of the fire on the sixth floor after smoking a cigarette. In fact, after talking to Bill and after going through the documents two or three more times, I don’t believe he was responsible for starting the fire. What I’ve come to believe, however, is that Terry Gene Davis was worried that he may have accidentally started the fire on the sixth floor, which would explain his words and actions afterward.

Here’s why I think so:

—He ran directly to the sixth floor

As we discussed earlier, there was a lot of confusion as to where the fire was among the people who were in the building. The fire marshal himself said that it was initially thought that the fire was on the fourth or fifth floors. Here’s just a sampling of some the comments that had been made to the FBI:

The 3^rd floor

• At roughly 12:27 a.m., one long-time employee rode a freight elevator to the third floor to try to locate the fire.

The 4^th floor

• One of the guards at the east entrance was preparing to sign out the employees when he was told there was a fire on the fourth floor. When he got there, he decided it must be on fifth floor but he couldn’t make it further due to all the smoke.
• At 12:25-12:35, three firemen arrived on the fourth floor and called the guards to turn on the escalators so more firemen could join them.

The 5^th floor

• Bill recalls hearing the motorcyclist at the front door saying that the fire was on the fifth floor when he and Terry were standing at the west entrance.
• At roughly 12:20 a.m., one custodian at the east entrance recalls hearing someone shouting that there was a fire on the fifth and sixth floors.
• A guy who worked on the maintenance crew said that at a few minutes after 12:30 a.m., his supervisor had instructed him and four or five others to go to the fifth floor and put out the fire.

With all of those mixed messages flying around, at that critical moment—12:17 a.m., according to the National Archives’ timeline, which was just two minutes after Terry had ostensibly reached the second floor to sign out—Terry decided to head straight to the sixth floor to investigate. That’s kind of weird though, because A) at that point, people waiting inside were still confused regarding what floor it was on, and B) Terry didn’t even work on the sixth floor. Terry worked on floors four and five. You’d think that if he was going to run anywhere—and by the by, he was in full run, definitely not walking, according to Bill—it would have been to one of those floors. Bill, who cleaned the offices on the northeast part of the sixth floor, followed Terry. His plan was to grab a fire hose when he got there, because why run to a fire without bringing along something to put the fire out? But Terry was more interested in finding the source of the fire. Just as he said to the FBI investigator, he wanted “to go take a look at it.” So that’s kind of weird too.

—He wanted to make sure everyone knew that the smoke and flames weren’t on the southwest side

During his initial interview, which took place on July 17, 1973, there was something that Terry wanted to make sure that the FBI was fully aware of—so much so, that he said it more than once.

The message he wanted to convey to the FBI was that the fire hadn’t started on the southwest part of the sixth floor. No way, no how.

Here’s the first time he said it, which can be found on page 1 of his July statement:

“DAVIS opened a door in the hallway which leads to the file section on the sixth floor in the southwest corner of the building. He walked over to the south side of the building where the windows are located and said that the west one-third of the building on the sixth floor in the file section was not on fire and was relatively clear of smoke. However, as he looked toward the east end of the building, and began walking in this direction, he ran into a solid wall of heavy dense, grayish-black smoke. He estimated that this covered the other two-thirds of the floor. At that time he left the file area and entered into the hallway; and tried to close a few doors that were opened in the file section.”

And here’s the second time, which is on page 2 of his statement:

“DAVIS emphasized on the west one-third of the sixth floor he did not observe any flames and the area was relatively clear of smoke.”

First, I need to point out that the FBI special agent who was taking Terry’s statement got Terry’s location all wrong on page 1. Terry had taken the stairwell in the northwest corner of the building, not the southwest (see red map). Also, Bill doesn’t know what “few doors” in the file section Terry would have closed as he was running away from the fire. There weren’t any doors in the file section–only the one set of double doors at the end of the hallway in the northwest corner of the sixth floor.

Second, Terry’s description of the fire’s location aligns perfectly with the security guard’s description. Both agreed that the first third of the building’s southwest side was clear of smoke and fire. 

Nevertheless, he seems a little defensive about the southwest corner. This is just a guess, and I can’t prove it, but I wonder if Terry may have been smoking in the southwest corner of the sixth floor earlier in the evening and he wanted to make sure that everyone was aware that the fire did not start there.

–He gave a weird answer when he told the FBI about his trip to the sixth floor

You know that wall of heavy, dense, grayish-black smoke that Terry ran into as he “walked” eastward on the sixth floor, and how he then “left the file area and entered into the hallway”? I think that’s the moment when Bill opened the stairwell door and saw Terry’s face as he exited the hallway.

But here’s the rub: on page 2 of Terry’s statement, it says:

“He said on his travels to and from the sixth floor he did not observe anyone else.”

Bill is a thoroughly credible source. During our phone conversations, his neurons were firing numbers, names, and dates in real time, to the point where I believe every word he says concerning the fire or anything else for that matter. If Bill saw Terry’s frightened face (and I believe that he did), then I’d have to think that Terry saw Bill’s face too. I mean…maybe Terry didn’t see Bill, considering all the smoke. But Bill had opened the stairwell door that Terry’s eyes were fixed upon—so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Bill also thinks that when he saw all the smoke behind Terry, he probably exited quickly, employing some Ninja moves to jump from landing to landing in the stairwell to get down from the sixth floor. (He says he used to be pretty good at that.) But it’s a strange omission, which might be a signal that Terry was nervous about something.

–He missed work on the day the grand jury had met and he killed himself the very next day

Granted, Terry was undergoing a lot of stress at the time of his death. He’d recently been in a minor car accident, he was arrested for riding his motorcycle in a prohibited area, his girlfriend had left him, and his relationship with his parents was on the fritz too. In addition, he may have been experiencing hallucinations from his mental illness. An FBI report said he felt “possessed of a demon” and Bill recalls Terry claiming to see and feel “spirits” of some sort. 

Nevertheless, the timing of his suicide can’t be ignored. It was one day after the federal grand jury had returned their decision about the fire in which he was considered the strongest witness against one of his coworkers.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: even if he was stressing out about the grand jury, why would he kill himself if their decision was not to indict or to investigate further? 

That’s a good point. But remember that Terry lived in a cabin out in the boonies, next door to Bill. As it so happens, Bill didn’t have a telephone in his cabin, most likely because there wasn’t a telephone line hooked up to it. And if there wasn’t a telephone line connected to Bill’s cabin, then there wouldn’t have been a telephone line hooked up to Terry’s cabin either. Although Bill wasn’t aware that the U.S. attorney went before the grand jury on October 31, I strongly suspect that Terry—the strongest witness implicating BT—had been informed of the date. What I don’t think he’d been informed of was the grand jury’s decision at the time of his death.

Interesting. You’ve mentioned that BT didn’t smoke. Did Terry?

Bill doesn’t know if Terry smoked cigarettes, and perhaps he didn’t. But Terry did smoke pot. He said so in the third sentence of his suicide note. Here’s the first part of his note:

“There just isn’t any point to any of this. Nobody gives a damn and never has. Blame it on dope. Blame it on parents. But people *** are the cause of all the _______ _______ in the world. 

The smoking question is especially interesting though. What’s not stated explicitly in the FBI documents is that smoking cigarettes was permissible anywhere in the NPRC building EXCEPT for the file areas. People could smoke in offices, the corridors, the bathrooms, you name it. There were ashtrays throughout the building. One custodian’s sole responsibility was emptying ashtrays in all of the corridors on all six floors. If a person really needed a cigarette and it was during one of their breaks, they could have gone to the Finance Division on the fourth floor, the only place in the building with the air conditioning still turned on, and sat in the boss’s chair. Or they could have gone to the fifth-floor vending area and had a Coke with their smoke.

So why would anyone go to the sixth-floor file area to have a cigarette, especially in St. Louis in July, when it was so excruciatingly hot up there? There are two main reasons that I can think of: they’d go there if they didn’t want to be seen—the area was super dark at night—and they’d go there for access to the large exhaust fans. Those exhaust fans would have been perhaps the most important draw. Located in the windows all along the south side of the building, the exhaust fans could air out any telltale smoke aromas. They also were the perfect place to flick whatever a person had been smoking outside in the event a guard or supervisor should happen by. My guess? A person would be more inclined to go there to smoke a joint versus a run-of-the-mill cigarette.

What was the evidence that Terry had provided against BT?

This was a puzzler at first, because none of the five witnesses’ personal descriptions matched Terry’s personal description from his July interview. I also couldn’t find a statement from anyone that was considerably stronger than everyone else’s. I still can’t. But I think I’ve figured out how Terry fit into the picture. 

I think Terry was the witness that I’ve labeled as #4. He was interviewed on October 15, 1973, three days after BT had signed his confession. The FBI agent described Terry’s hair as being blonde instead of brown, the latter of which was his hair color in his July statement. Although that part threw me off—hair generally gets lighter in the summer, not the fall—the rest fell into place.

Two giveaways that this witness was indeed Terry are 1) the witness was employed in his position at the NPRC since June 1972, which is consistent with Terry’s July statement, and 2) he claimed to have been on the sixth floor the night of the fire, after the fire had started. Very few people that I know of could say that—only Bill and Terry, and it wasn’t Bill. (Even a guard who tried to take an elevator to the sixth floor wasn’t able to get off due to all of the smoke. He couldn’t even open the door from the stairwell because the smoke was so heavy.)

Here’s one telling paragraph. Although the names are redacted in the document, I’ve inserted them here to make it more readable. I’ve put Terry’s last name in brackets, since this is still a hypothesis:

“On October 11, 1973, [DAVIS] said he again discussed the fire with BT and BT repeated that he had started the fire. On this occasion, BT had advised that he had brought matches from home. [DAVIS] said he had pointed out to BT that he had previously stated the matches were found on the first floor. BT merely responded with a ‘Yeah.’ During this conversation, BT said he started the fire near the west end of the 6th floor. [DAVIS] said he at first tended to disbelieve what BT was saying because on the night of the fire [DAVIS] was on the sixth floor after the fire started and he noticed no flames toward the west end.”

Later in his statement, he said “BT had said he was responsible for the fire frequently enough and earnestly enough that he began to ‘seriously wonder if BT may have actually been responsible for the fire.’” In his closing, he said that it appeared that BT was showing concern about what could happen to the person who started the fire, “and that this lent substance to his belief that BT may have, in fact, set the fire at the records center.”

If Terry was genuinely worried that he may have accidentally started the fire, it would have been a huge load off his conscience if it turned out that something or someone else was responsible. And if BT was walking around telling everyone that he was the one who’d done it, well, who was Terry to argue with him?

From the little I know about Terry Gene Davis, he didn’t seem to be a mean or vengeful person, or someone who would lie to protect his own hide. He even weighed both sides of the matter with his FBI interviewer. On the one hand, there were discrepancies to BT’s stories, which led him to disregard them. On the other hand, when BT seemed concerned about how the responsible party would be punished, that’s when Terry became more convinced that BT “may have, in fact, set the fire at the records center.”

You can read his statement in its entirety here.

What does Bill think?

There are things about the fire that bother Bill to this day. As I mentioned earlier, Bill doesn’t think that BT started the fire. He doesn’t think Terry started the fire either, and he’s not even convinced that Terry had been on the sixth floor smoking at any time that day.

One thing that he finds perplexing is how intense the fire had become in such a short time. People hadn’t even begun to smell the smoke until around 12:15 a.m., and by that time, it was already too late. Bill and others have pointed out that, although there was paper everywhere in the file area, the files were packed tightly in sturdy boxes on steel shelving units. That’s not generally the best-case scenario in which paper catches fire quickly.

Besides, another sixth-floor custodian had left that floor at 12:05 a.m. and he didn’t see or smell any smoke or fire as he entered the elevator to head down to the first floor to return his cart. But, according to the National Archives’ timeline, the motorcyclist had shown up to alert people in the building about the fire at 12:11 a.m., only six minutes later. And by the time Terry and Bill had made their way to the sixth floor at around 12:17 a.m., that fire had taken over two-thirds of the floor, according to Terry’s July 1973 statement. I’ve tried to start campfires with a Bic lighter and a rolled-up newspaper, and it’s taken me longer than that to get something going.

Another aspect of the case that Bill has been bothered about is the vault that was located across the hallway from the office area on the sixth floor. The vault stored confidential documents pertaining to…well, we don’t really know what they pertained to, which is why they were in the vault. Bill and the other custodians used to refer to it as the “VIP/Secrets” vault or just “VIP vault,” and Bill says that many of the documents pertained to famous people. In addition, documents stored in the vault covered such broad topics as combat operations, courts-martial, publications, research and development, the Air Force, the Army, certain military personnel records, and the largest category of all, “Other.”

On July 14, it was discovered that even the vault had caught on fire at some point, although many documents stored there had ostensibly survived—something to the tune of at least 4,796 cubic feet of them. According to Bill, after the sixth floor had been cleared for a select few people to go back up there, a security guard was posted outside the vault, most likely due to the fact that there was a newly created gaping hole in its back wall, which now opened into the file area. 

Five days later, the special agent in charge (SAC) in St. Louis—a guy named Robert G. Kunkel—wrote a memo to FBI director Clarence Kelly describing the records stored on each floor of the building. Kunkel stated that “with the exception of an insignificant percentage of 1973 registry” (which was a portion of the names of Army personnel who had been discharged after January 1, 1972), “the records on the sixth floor were totally destroyed.” 

But that was—let’s see, how does one put this delicately?—super untrue. Judging by what the fire marshal had said, documents that were farther away from the fire’s origin may have been singed but they appeared to be “75 percent intact with only the edges burned.” Also, Kunkel had neglected to mention the 4,796 cubic feet of records in the vault that had survived. 

So, the inconsistent descriptions of how many classified documents inside the vault had survived the fire and how those documents were handled after the fire are another issue for Bill.

Then there was the question of the fire’s origin. We’ll be going into more detail on this subject in a couple seconds, but let’s just say here that the authorities claimed not to have a definite answer on that.  But it was pretty obvious where the site of the most intense heat was located, and that was…wait for it…near the vault. According to the fire marshal’s interview with the FBI, a “great amount of heat had been concentrated” in a region he’d described as being “toward the center of the building.” He later stated that the fire’s origin was in that same central region, “about 75 to 100 feet from the south windows in a northerly direction.” Hello? That’s near the vault. As Bill recalls, office supplies—staplers, telephones, and other paraphernalia—had melted to desks in the office area, which was, again, near the vault. For these and other soon-to-be-reported reasons, Bill has wondered if the fire’s cause had more to do with the vault than with someone’s smoldering cigarette. 

But don’t just take my word for it. Bill has written a statement that describes his experience leading up to, during, and after the fire, which I’ve included at the end of this post. You’re going to want to give it a read. His story has never been told in print before. 

What else can you tell us about the 6^th floor vault?

Is everyone sitting down? Beverages freshened? Good, because I have something pretty huge to lay on you right now. 

I agree with Bill—there was definitely something fishy going on with that vault. Of course, you won’t get any help from the FBI on this topic, since, again, then-SAC Robert G. Kunkel (the same Robert G. Kunkel who, months earlier, had made national headlines for doctoring records in D.C.’s field office and being demoted to St. Louis by interim FBI director Patrick Gray) didn’t feel it was worth mentioning in his July 19 memo. But Bill has recently sent me some documents he’d obtained through the General Services Administration (GSA), which managed the building, and which had conducted their own investigation into the fire. Trust me, even though the FBI appears to be in the dark, the vault was getting lots of attention after the fire. Here’s what I can tell you:

— On July 16, 1973, a guard was placed outside the vault to protect the material inside, just as Bill had said. The reason was because Warren B. Griffin, then-acting director of the NPRC, had been up on the sixth floor and determined that “possible compromise of the classified material existed…” which I think may be code for “oh good Lord, there’s a ginormous hole in the back of the vault!”

— On July 19, 1973, an action plan was developed to remove the surviving documents from the vault. (Did you hear that, Robert G. Kunkel? A document written on the same day as your memo says there were surviving documents!) The plan was to remove Top Secret documents first, then the Secret and Confidential files, including Official Military Personnel Files (OMPFs) that contained classified material, then the sensitive material, then the OMPF’s of employees and relatives. Furthermore, they’d said that the Top Secret material was in 22 file cabinet safes and 80 boxes, and that the “material in safes are in wrapped packages or wrapped boxes—all numbered.” But best of all, they said “Our present impression (based on previous visit to vault area) is that this material is in fair to good shape.” That seems like excellent news!

— A July 31, 1973, work plan on the Sixth Floor Vault Project provided a few more details about the surviving files. Most of the records had been moved out of the vault by that date. The two kinds of records that remained were: damp records (from all the water that had been sprayed on them) and records that were “badly burned or otherwise not salvageable.” As for the records that had already been moved out, about 90 percent of the records that were damp but salvageable had been moved to the 3^rd floor vault. Still to be moved into the 3^rd floor vault were about “17 (5-drawer cabinets) of Air Force ‘Top Secret’” records and “several cabinets of Tech Orders,” all of which were still sitting in a temporary location. Roughly 95% of the badly burned records had been moved to a staging site, where they would eventually be transported to the Metropolitan Sewer District’s incinerator. We would later learn that the total amount of badly burned records in the vault was 2087 cubic feet, which were incinerated in August 1973.

— For those of you keeping track at home, that would mean that, of the 4,796 cubic feet of documents that had once occupied the vault, 2,087 cubic feet of documents were badly burned and unsalvageable, which would result in 2,709 cubic feet of still-usable documents that remained, right?

— Nope! On February 6, 1975, almost two years after the fire, Warren Griffin, who was now the director of the NPRC, provided a somewhat smaller number for the badly burned or water-damaged documents once stored in the 6^th-floor vault: 4,557 cubic feet. After subtracting the 2,087 cubic feet of documents that had been incinerated in August 1973, 2,470 cubic feet of documents remained, according to Griffin. It was these documents, which he described as “Air Force Research and Development case files,” that he decided to incinerate on February 6, 1975, 19 months after the July 12, 1973, fire.

“Umm…what’s that now?” you ask.

Me: Oh, yeah. Two years after the fire, the director of the NPRC obtained authorization to incinerate the remaining documents from the 6^th floor vault, which were described as 2,470 cubic feet’s worth of Air Force R&D case files.

You: 

Me: 

You: But why?

Me: Oh, his reason? Though it isn’t clear who the recipient was, Griffin wrote in a memo that: “It has since been determined that the integrity of individual series and cases has been completely destroyed and that the intellectual control over the records is completely lost.” 

You: He seems, I dunno…panicked?

Me: He kinda does, doesn’t he? Remember that the man is referring to the Top Secret Air Force documents, which were ostensibly still numbered in cabinet safes and boxes and sitting inside a 3^rdfloor vault. So it’s rather illogical that Griffin would have felt all of the sudden that the “integrity “of the series and cases had been “completely destroyed” and the “intellectual control” had been “completely lost.” What could have possibly happened nearly two years after the fire that would have prompted this call to action?

As it turns out, I think I know. 

What’s the answer? Why did the director of the NPRC incinerate 2,470 cubic feet of Top Secret Air Force R&D records that were in relatively good condition two years after the fire?

I think Warren Griffins’ verbiage about destroyed integrity and lost intellectual control was code for “oh good Lord, the Senate has put together a committee to study intelligence activities of the CIA, FBI, and military, and they’re going to be coming after these documents.” On January 28, 1975, roughly one week earlier, it was announced that the Church Committee would be studying abuses in intelligence activities that would eventually lay bare Projects Artichoke and MKULTRA, among others, for the world to view. 

You know, to be honest, I’d always thought that my research into the St. Louis NPRC fire was a sideline activity…something to do during down periods as I waited on responses to FOIA requests that I’d submitted on Ron Tammen. Now it seems as though the St. Louis fire might have some relevance to Tammen’s case after all. As many of you know, we’ve been talking about Air Force Research and Development for a long time now. Could one of those case files have been Ron’s? Were Doc Switzer or Jolly West mentioned in one or two of them? I wonder.

Whoa…so if BT or Terry didn’t cause the fire, who did? 

Great question. Although I don’t know the answer, one document amid the hundreds in the FBI’s collection seems as if it could offer up a clue. Remember how BT was asked how easy it was for an outsider to get into the building, and he said it would be very difficult? The FBI posed that question to several other people as well. Normally it was quite difficult for an outsider to enter the building after hours.

The reason is that both the main (west) entrance and the back (east) entrance were locked at 5 p.m. Everyone during the late shift was basically locked inside the building throughout their workday except for during their half-hour lunch break, when they were permitted to go off site, though most people ate in the fifth-floor vending area. After their shift was over at 12:30 a.m., custodians could exit from both the east and west entrances.

More importantly, however, is that after 5 p.m., no one could enter by way of the east entrance. People could only enter through the main entrance. And because the main entrance was locked, the guard would have to let them in.

Bill told me a rather amusing anecdote concerning how stringent the General Services Administration’s protocol was. When the first fire fighters had arrived, they weren’t permitted inside the building until the guard had called GSA headquarters in Kansas City to get permission to let them in. Bill, having returned from the sixth floor and seen what they would be up against, recalls watching the firefighters standing helplessly outside. Bill got so fed up, he took it upon himself to open the door to let them in.

Got the picture? The building was extremely closed-up, and very tightly locked, and extraordinarily difficult to enter from the outside. 

So imagine my surprise when I read an FBI report summing up the notes of one of the firefighter units which described a conversation between two guards who were standing at the east entrance at 3:45 a.m. on July 12. It read:

“The conversation the guards were engaged in concerned two individuals who entered the east door of the center at about 11:45 A.M., July 11, 1973, just prior to the fire being discovered.”

Mind you, the time 11:45 a.m.—as in 11:45 in the morning—on July 11, 1973, was nowhere near “just prior to the fire being discovered.” If the two individuals had truly entered the building at 11:45 a.m., that would have been 12½ hours before the fire was discovered, and no one would have thought twice about someone entering the building at that time. Someone—was it the firefighting unit or the FBI?—had gotten their A.M.s and their P.M.s confused. The guards were actually discussing two people who had entered the building at 11:45 p.m.—roughly one-half hour before the fire was discovered—through a door that no one was supposed to enter after 5 p.m. I’ve since obtained confirmation that the time that the two men entered the building through the wrong door was 2345 hours—which is 11:45 p.m.

Questions? Concerns?

The document proceeds to discuss how the guards tried to find the two individuals and even radioed for help, but they were unsuccessful. One of the guards said that they might have been college students hired for the summer, but that wouldn’t have mattered. Entering the building through the east entrance wasn’t permitted after 5 p.m. by anyone, let alone a couple of temporary college students. And the fact that the guards were still discussing it at 3:45 a.m. tells me that they didn’t think it was nothing either.

Can you post a map of the sixth floor that shows us where the fire originated?

LOL! Sorry, I shouldn’t laugh, but here’s the situation: out of the hundreds of pages of documents that the FBI has sent me regarding their investigation into the fire that destroyed the sixth floor of the NPRC, a schematic of the sixth floor was not included. If you want to see grainy black and white pictures of firetrucks and hoses pouring water all over the roof of the NPRC building, as well as the charred and melted aftermath of the fire, the FBI has scads of those. But an actual drawing of the sixth floor of the building? One that shows the layout of the hallway and the office area and the file area as well as the rest rooms and escalators and the elevators and stairwells and where the vault was and a big X where the fire was thought to have originated? They don’t have that. Or at least, if they did, they don’t think you and I should have access to it. In fact, the only drawing they provided of the building with the approximate location of where the smoke was coming from was produced by our friend the motorcyclist, who’d spotted the smoke from his workplace at Carter Carburetor and who rode to the NPRC to alert everyone inside. I used the motorcyclist’s drawing to make my drawing of key areas in the building because I, like him, believe drawings can be helpful.

Another person who I’m guessing could appreciate the importance of a drawing is the fire marshal. According to an interview typed up by an FBI agent, the fire marshal had arrived shortly after an alarm sounded (which, according to the FBI summary, happened at 12:13 a.m.), however, he was unable to examine the damage on the sixth floor due to the intensity of the heat and smoke. He did the next best thing: he surveyed the damage while looking through the south windows and focused his attention on the area that appeared to have been subjected to the most intense heat. In his interview with the FBI, the fire marshal said that, based on the fire’s intensity, he would have guessed that it had been smoldering since 4 p.m. the previous day, which we know wasn’t the case since people had been working on that floor all night and no one had started to smell smoke until around 12:15 a.m. 

On page one of his remarks to his FBI interviewer, the fire marshal said that the origin of the fire was “somewhere in the immediate vicinity of upright columns A17 and A20 on the sixth floor of the building.” But on the second page of his remarks, he’d said something different. He said that “based on his survey in the A17 to A20 column area, he believed that the fire had begun in this vicinity approximately 75 to 100 feet from the south windows in a northerly direction,” which is more centrally located. From where he was standing, he couldn’t tell which columns were in the fire’s hottest region, so he was using columns A17 and A20 to demarcate the east-west boundaries and picturing two imaginary lines running north from those columns to guesstimate the general region. While that’s very helpful, imagine how much more helpful his description would have been if only there’d been an accompanying diagram. 

Well, we’re in luck!

Thanks to Bill, I can now provide a floor plan of the 6^th floor of the NPRC. The letters A-N run from south to north and the numbers 1-33 run from west to east. Therefore, the A columns are closest to the south windows, which makes sense, since that’s where the fire marshal had been standing.

I’m also providing a map with the area of greatest heat generated marked off. Note that the area is to the immediate south and east of the vault area, and marked off by columns F to H from south to north and 18 to 23 from east to west, which is very close to what the fire marshal had guesstimated on page 2 of his interview.

What I find especially interesting is that the origin of the fire wasn’t along the south windows, which was where the smoke had been billowing from, and which was also the most likely place in which someone would go to smoke a cigarette, be it tobacco or marijuana. It’s also a different location than what the fire marshal had ostensibly said on page one of his remarks, when he said (again, ostensibly) it was in the “immediate vicinity” of columns A17 to A20. However, the area of heaviest burn corresponds perfectly with the fire marshal’s description of the fire’s origin on page two of his remarks, and those remarks also align with the comments of the firefighters who had the most direct knowledge of the fire’s intensity. Nevertheless, GSA officials chose to ignore the comments of the firefighters as well as the fire marshal when they issued their September 1973 report. The report said “the exact point of origin of the fire cannot be established,” however the writers ventured a guess anyway. Their guess was that it had started in the southeast corner of the building based on comments from six individuals who’d been watching the fire during its “early stages from the south side of the building.”

I also find it fascinating how BT said in his confession that he was standing “at the end of the files near the south end of the building” [bold added]. He continued, “I can’t recall the exact column number, but it was somewhere in the middle of the building, more to the west than the east.” So even if BT was smoking on the 6th floor, and I don’t believe for a minute that he was, he wasn’t doing it where the fire marshal had pinpointed the location of the fire’s origin. And while we’re at it, why are we reading an FBI special agent’s notes from an interview with the fire marshal instead of the fire marshal’s actual report?

Something tells me that the FBI thinks it’s just better to take their word for it. 

What did the FBI investigators really find out?

Oh, who the heck really knows? But let’s all keep this in mind: the FBI—ostensibly the most savvy bunch of investigators found anywhere in the world—considered Terry Davis’ even-handed remarks to be THE strongest piece of evidence implicating BT in setting the fire, even over BT’s signed confession, even despite all the discrepancies in BT’s story. 

This tells me that either the FBI back then wasn’t as good at conducting investigations as they’d been leading people to believe, or maybe they didn’t care who they pinned it on, as long as they pinned it on someone, and this particular someone seemed the easiest. 

So what’s holding firm from your original theory?

I’m not sure how to say this, and I mean it in the nicest possible way, but, you guys? I don’t really trust the FBI. What with their A.M.s instead of P.M.s, their “southwests” instead of “northwests,” and their deafening silence regarding the vault, not to mention all of the other weirdnesses in these documents, I honestly don’t know what to believe.

What’s more, based on Bill’s account and the fire marshal’s description of where the fire had originated, and the sheer size of the building, I don’t even know where Terry ran—and he was definitely running, not walking—when he went to the sixth floor. Remember that the building was over two football fields long from west to east and almost one football field wide from north to south. According to Terry’s statement from his July interview, he “walked” to the south windows and then walked east along the south wall and that’s when he turned around. That only makes sense if he entered the file area from the southwest, which he did not do. Do you know how impossible it would have been for him to make it to the south wall from the northwest corner of the building in the amount of time he had? Bill was barely a minute behind him and Terry was already exiting the main hallway through the double doors.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that, not only is it important to take what’s been written by the various FBI agents with a grain of salt, I’d suggest reading these documents while sitting in a salt cave in the general vicinity of the Great Salt Lake while drinking margueritas with, you guessed it, your trusty shaker of salt at the ready. I believe that FBI agents doctored documents to support their claims about who caused the fire, framing someone whom they knew didn’t do it to the point where they coerced him to sign a false confession. Then, they had the chutzpah to provide their extraordinarily false and doctored evidence to a U.S. attorney to take before a federal grand jury. Thankfully, they were unsuccessful in getting an indictment.

I cannot say with confidence that the FBI blamed the fire on BT because of overt racism, since BT was telling people that he’d done it. He was an easy scapegoat. I also don’t know why the FBI felt the need for the cover-up. In my first write-up, I suggested that an FBI agent may have been the source of the culprit cigarette. Now, I think this case has become a whole lot larger than that, which is likely why any serious researcher or reporter who has waded into it seems to not want to investigate any further.

And that brings us back to Terry Davis and his suicide note, which continues to be 100 percent on point. As Terry asked, and I dismally echo: “Where is truth? Where is love? Where is anything that is real?”

***********

If you are having thoughts of suicide, dial 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Prevention Hotline.

***********

ADDENDUM

In his February 6, 1975, memo, Warren Griffin said that he had assembled “descriptive listings” of all the Top Secret documents that he’d incinerated. I’ve submitted a FOIA request to the GSA for those descriptive listings.

I have also submitted a FOIA request to the National Archives seeking the Standard Form 115 that authorized Mr. Griffin to destroy the 2,470 cubic feet of Top Secret Air Force R&D documents.

I have also contacted the Community Fire Protection District in St. Louis seeking the official report from the fire marshal at that time, James J. Kennedy. The current fire marshal told me that he’d let me know if he found it, although he wasn’t optimistic due to the amount of time that had transpired. Still no word.

I don’t intend to follow this story to the end since I need to concentrate on Ron Tammen, but I will post any additional documents I receive for anyone who’s interested. If you happen to be a credentialed investigative reporter and wish to pursue this story (and I mean truly pursue it, Woodward-and-Bernstein-style), feel free to contact me by way of the menu at the top of the page. I have additional information that I’ll be happy to provide that would serve as a good starting point. And you’re going to want to talk to Bill. Trust me. There’s a story here. 

*****

QUICKIE UPDATE (3/26/2024): I now have the fire marshal’s report from the 1973 NPRC fire, and there’s something very, very wrong with it

As I mentioned in the addendum, I’d submitted a public records request to the Community Fire Protection District, in Overland, MO, seeking the fire marshal’s report from that fire. The fire marshal at the time was a man named James Kennedy, who was also the assistant fire chief.

Here ya go!

So…..whadya think? If you’re like our friend Bill Elmore and me, you’re thinking:

Because, you guys, let’s all think about what it would have been like to have been the fire marshal on that date and in that particular fire district. This was in all probability the BIGGEST FIRE he’d ever investigated in his entire career. This fire could have been his shining moment—the pinnacle of his career. And how did he choose to document his once-in-a-lifetime, career-defining fire? He typed up a cover sheet and a two-page narrative, double-spaced no less, that discusses things like pumpers and aerials but that completely avoids any discussion of the cause or origin of the fire, even though that’s one of the primary responsibilities of his position. I don’t want to brag or anything, but I’ve written WAY more about the origin and possible cause of that fire than James Kennedy did.

When I compared Kennedy’s August 9, 1973, report with the interview notes that the FBI special agent had written summarizing their discussion on July 17, 1973, I found some interesting discrepancies. Three of the most prominent ones are:

• In the July 17 interview, he talked about standing outside the south windows of the building and eyeballing the region of most intense heat. He talked about how the origin of the fire was in an area between columns A17 and A20, about 75 feet to 100 feet north of the south windows. He described a progression of remains from the area of greatest heat intensity and moving southward, beginning with no ash, to “powdered white ash to heavier gray ash to charred chunks of files to a point near the south windows where the files are approximately 75% intact with only the edges being burned.” But in his August 9 report, written a little over 3 weeks later, he decided to leave out all of those helpful details. How come?

• The FBI’s report, released July 30, 1973, has the following subject head, in all caps: “DESTRUCTION OF GOVERNMENT PROPERTY – POSSIBLE ARSON.” It’s the fire marshal’s responsibility to conduct arson investigations, yet that word isn’t included anywhere in his report. Why not?

• He never mentions the vault.

Even though Kennedy doesn’t discuss the fire’s origin outright, he does give one additional clue that he hadn’t given in the July 17 interview. He said that the heat was so intense that the masks “began to collapse on the faces of firefighters” when they opened the door to the “corridor.” He’s of course referring to the double doors leading to the main hallway, in the northwest corner of the building. I believe this stray comment supplies additional evidence that the origin of the fire was farther north, not near the south windows, which was where BT’s so-called signed confession claimed he was standing when he put out his cigarette.

As it so happens, on July 13, 1973, another fire marshal, this one representing St. Louis County, is quoted in a news article saying that he was often asked to assist fire districts with determining the cause of a fire. Had Kennedy sought his assistance too? If so, what might he have had to say about the cause and origin of the fire? I don’t know, but in hopes of arriving at an answer, I’ve submitted a public records request to St. Louis County for Fire Marshal James E. Huntinghaus’ investigation. I’ll keep you posted.

ANOTHER QUICKIE UPDATE — 3/28/2024

I’ve already heard back from St. Louis County, MO, concerning my public records request, and they let me know that A) they don’t have a report from Fire Marshal James E. Huntinghaus from the 1973 NPRC fire, and B) the Community Fire Protection District was indeed the lead department in the fire. Therefore, it was Fire Marshal James Kennedy who was standing outside the south windows and counting columns; it was James Kennedy who was eyeballing the origin of the fire based on the region of greatest heat intensity; it was James Kennedy who’d sat down with the FBI on July 17, 1973, and told them about his investigation findings; and it was James Kennedy who, for whatever reason, submitted a watered-down report 3 weeks later, on August 9, 1973. Good to know.

***********

Bill’s Statement

On January 13, 1972, I was notified that my enlistment in the United States Air Force was ending on January 14, 1972, as I was being given an unexpected early out Hardship Discharge based on my father’s paralysis from a fall.  I returned home to St. Louis a year early and initially moved into my parents’ basement to better assist them. Within 30 days, I returned to my previous factory job and endured a series of lay-offs at the downsizing DOD contractor. 

In May 1972, the Missouri Job Service called me about a Career Conditional Veterans Readjustment Appointment (VRA) position available as a GSA GS1 janitor at the National Personnel (Military) Records Center (NPRC) located just 2 miles from my parents’ home in Overland, Missouri. One requirement of the VRA position was that I also attend college full time in addition to working full time at NPRC, 4 pm to 12:30 am, each night.  After I was referred to the NPRC, I was interviewed, given a physical, and hired beginning June 1972. When I reported to NPRC for my first night’s work, I was assigned to clean 1/2 of the office space (approximately 27,000 square feet) on the northeast side of the 6th, or top, floor of NPRC at 9700 Page Blvd. in Overland, Mo.

There were 3 types of workers who made up the 30 to 40 janitors who worked nights at NPRC. Approximately 12 were recently discharged veterans (all VRA appointments like me), approximately 10 or 15 were older black gentlemen that worked as immediate, middle, and top supervisors of the custodial work force, and approximately a dozen were physically or otherwise challenged individuals. On my 266,000 square foot 6th floor, approximately 1/5th was walled off office space where file clerks worked through thousands of individual military records each day. My office space was separated by a central hallway and concrete block wall from the giant open files area where individual DOD military records were kept in cardboard (201) file folders, packed tightly in cardboard boxes, and stored on metal shelving stacked from the floor to the ceiling.  The back (or southern) 729-foot-long wall of the files area also contained windows and numerous large exhaust fans. Off the main hallway and jutting into the 200+ foot deep file area were three elevators, stairwells, two industrial-sized bathrooms, a storage room full of toilet paper and hand towels in boxes, and a singular vault with a small office and desk that was unmanned at night, with the bank vault-like door always closed and locked. 

There were three janitors who worked on the 6th floor: me, another VRA janitor who cleaned the bathrooms and hallways, and a younger woman who cleaned the northwest section of the north side offices that ran the full width of the building. Later, each floor of the NPRC was described by one of the firemen fighting the 1973 fire as being the size of five football fields. The total NPRC floor space was more than the total floor space of the Empire State Building in NY City, and while the NPRC was air-conditioned, the central air conditioning was turned off each night at 5PM.  

July in St. Louis is famously hot and humid, and 6, my floor, was the hottest.

The NPRC Fire started/was discovered on July 12 and was (sort of) finally put out on July 16, 1973. More than 50 million gallons of water were used fighting the fire. Forty-two fire departments were involved, and 381 firemen fought the fire. FBI Arson Investigators were flown in from DC on July 12. GSA (who managed the building) created their own special investigative committee. The future National Archivist of the USA issued their own investigative report. The national Army Reserve Personnel Command occupied much of the building, and the FBI, the OPM (Office of Personnel Management), and numerous other federal agencies had offices in NPRC.  More than 2,000 federal employees worked in NPRC.   

July 11, 1973, was a typical hot and humid St. Louis summer day, and after attending my classes at the community college, I reported to work at NPRC for my usual 4 pm to 12:30 am night shift.  That night (July 11), in addition to the usual three janitors who worked on 6, we also had a “wax crew” made up of a career janitor and 2 or 3 high school students who were mopping and waxing the main hallway and the offices on 6 that night.  Because of the hot night and the wax crew working on 6, at about 10:30 pm, and after cleaning my area, I went down to the fourth floor to fellow VRA janitor Terry Davis’ area, as his offices were the only ones I knew that had window AC units that were kept on.  At approximately midnight, Terry and I left his area and took our trash carts down to the basement at the northeastern end of the first floor to empty our trash, put our carts away, and then we walked through the main hallway to the northwestern section on the 2nd floor where the main entrance to NPRC was located, locked at night, and guarded. All janitors were required to sign out at 12:30 AM each night as witnessed by the guards at their station.

At approximately 12:11 AM (July 12, 1973), Terry and I were standing chatting with other janitors inside the 2nd set of interior glass doors at the main entrance next to a stairwell door that was across from the guard station waiting for 12:30 AM to sign out.  As I was looking out through the double set of glass doors toward the western parking lot, I saw a motorcycle pull up and a guy in brown leathers (who had left work at Carter Carburetor at 12:07 am in neighboring Olivette) get off his bike and run up the 8 or 10 stairs to the (2nd) set of exterior glass doors that were locked.  While he was trying to open the exterior doors, one of the guards pushed through the interior set of doors, went to the exterior doors and I heard the motorcycle guy tell the guard that the south (back) wall of the 5th floor was on fire.  The Guard then went outside, went to the southwest part of the NPRC grounds to look, then returned to his guard station and called the local fire department to report the fire. At about 12:16 AM, Terry and I were still standing at the 2nd floor stairwell entrance and suddenly, Terry opened the door and ran up the stairs towards 6. Perhaps a minute later, I followed Terry up that same stairwell as I knew where the fire stand hose was. I remember thinking, if the fire was on 6, it was going to be my job the next night to clean it up, so I was intent on getting the fire hose to put the fire out.  Before I ran up those stairs, I went over to the guards and informed them that the 5th floor southern wall exhaust fans had been on, and that those running fans might be feeding air to the fire. I then ran up the stairwell stairs and when I got to 6, I began opening the door to the lobby next to the freight elevator and across from the escalator with the intent of getting the rolled-up fire hose off the wall that faced the escalator and go fight the fire.  As I began to step out into the lobby between the elevator and escalator, I saw Terry running back toward the double doors that separated the lobby (with the hose) from the main hallway on 6 that bordered the files area on the right and the offices wall on the left.  In addition to seeing the scared look on Terry’s face, I noticed he was running back toward that same stairwell door I was just opening, AND there was a wall, floor to ceiling, of thick, mostly grey smoke chasing him, and moving faster than he could run. I pushed the door open and turned around and ran back down the stairwell to the 2nd floor as I knew I could not get the hose and go fight the fire as the smoke was too thick, dangerous, and dense.  

Meanwhile, at 16 minutes and 15 seconds after midnight, the North Central County Fire Alarm System received a call from the Olivette Fire Department reporting the fire at the Records Center, and 20 seconds later, North Central received a call directly from the guard at NPRC reporting the fire on 6.  When I got back down to 2, and while standing at the interior set of glass doors, I began smelling smoke, then at 20 minutes and 35 seconds after midnight, the first fire trucks and men arrived at that western entrance to NPRC.  Of note, initially the guards at the entrance desk did not let the fire men in as they (the guards) were still trying to call GSA Regional managers in Kansas City to wake them up and get permission to let the firemen in.  Given that I was smelling smoke on 2 by then, I pushed through the first (interior) set of glass doors and then I pushed open the exterior 2nd set of glass doors as I personally let the first firemen in.  Those same firemen then went up the escalator to the 4th floor, then to the 5th floor and they reported heavy smoke but no heat or fire.  Then, the firemen went to the 6th floor (at 12:25 am) where they connected their hose to the pipe stand in the lobby and tried to used it for 10 to 20 seconds but because of the extreme heat, their water was vaporizing before ever reaching the flames, and the heat was so intense that they reported it was melting their fireman’s masks on their faces and that their black rubber coats were turning white. This caused them to retreat back to the 5th floor.  By 4:54am on July 12, the Deputy Fire Chief on site ordered all the firemen down and out of the building on the double, as he feared the structural integrity of the building was at risk.  

At 12:30 am, after we janitors were allowed to sign out, a few of us walked back to the southwest grounds (the grounds at NPRC totaled 70 acres) and we sat on the grass to watch the firemen fight the fire.  I remember looking up at that 6th floor southern exterior wall and noting to myself that the flames at that time were steadily burning about 20 to 30 feet wide and that flames were flickering another 20 or 30 feet on each side of the main fire in about the middle of that 729-foot-long back wall of windows, concrete blocks, and fans. 

What I thought then and what I still think to this day—and yes, I do understand that I am no fire expert—however, as an eye witness, neither I, nor anyone else I know who worked in the building that night, believe that a simple cigarette or a match, or an electrical short, or whatever else may have started a fire that could have caused the hundreds of feet wide and long area that contained millions of packed 201 files to be in flames so big, so quickly and so intensely without some kind of help beyond simply packed paper.  

But there has always the basic question of why?  The fire started sometime after 12:05 am, when the last VRA janitor left the 6th floor, and before 12:07 am, when the motorcycle guy first left work in Olivette and saw the flames.  He then arrived at NPRC at 12:11 am in neighboring Overland where he reported the fire to the NPRC guard.  At 12:16 am, the first fireman arrived at NPRC, and they made it all the way onto the 6th floor by 12:25 am where they were driven back.  And then at approximately 12:31 am, there I sat on the lawn and watched the fire burn at the back wall of the massive building. 

So, if the fire was not an accident, then why did the massive, perhaps largest fire in American government history occur on my watch, on my floor at the NPRC, in Overland, Missouri, where I grew up and where I went to grade school that was just one mile from that same Records Center? The fire destroyed or damaged some 16,000,000 to 18,000,000 individual veterans historical Department of Defense (DOD) 201 files, and additionally, 1694 files were destroyed or damaged in the GSA VIP/secrets vault that was located in the northern edge of the files section on the 6th floor, some 200+ feet from the south wall I watched burn.

And, how did the fire get so big, so fast?  After numerous arson investigations by the FBI experts from DC and by other organizations including GSA, including an effort by the FBI and the Federal Prosecuting Attorney to indict one of the physically challenged janitors was denied by a Federal Grand Jury of citizens in St. Louis, we still don’t know the real story, or as Terry said in his suicide note, what is truth?    

After 50-plus years of my own memories, thinking about, discussions with fellow workers, wondering and conducting my own research including hundreds of pages of FBI, GSA, fire department, and other records about the fire, its origins, and its aftermath, I, and we, still don’t know the truth!

— According to eyewitnesses, the fire started between 12:05 am and 12:07 am on July 12. 

— Terry and I both ran up to 6, and back down the stairwell at approximately 12:16/17am. 

— Terry reported to the FBI, during their arson investigations, that approximately 2/3 of the 6th floor 729′ x 200+’ files area was filled with smoke.   

— My belief is that the fire started near the middle of the files section on 6, somewhere behind or near the back of the 6th floor VIP/Secrets vault that jutted into the northern edge of the files section some two hundred feet north of the south exterior window and concrete wall with fans.  

— The FBI experts from DC conducted their initial arson investigation. 

— After the fire was finally extinguished (on July 16), and after the building was determined to be safe to reenter by structural engineers, all the janitors were recalled and we began working days on the cleanup of the NPRC, and we were instructed to NOT go onto the 6th floor as it was extremely dangerous.  

— The entire 6th floor was later scraped off with bulldozers and cranes, removed in large metal containers, and dumped into a landfill, and the NPRC became a 5-story building.

— After we (janitors) returned to work at NPRC, we were given 55-gallon wet vacs and instructed to begin sucking the 50+ million gallons of (funky) water out of the building that contained fiberglass, asbestos, Thymol, charred contents and who knows what else out of NPRC.  

— One morning, I snuck up to the 6th floor to take a look at my old office area. When I did, I noticed that the safe-like door to the secrets/VIP vault (which was right across the main hall from the entrance to my office area), was standing open (I had never seen it open before), so I took a peek inside and I noticed that the back concrete block wall of the vault, that jutted back into the northern edge of the files section was collapsed into the files that had been totally destroyed by the fire.

— Also of note to me was the St. Louis County fire marshal’s suggestion that for the fire to have gotten that big that fast, the fire had to smolder in the files for 8 or more hours before finally bursting into flames after midnight, something that those of us who actually worked on 6 that night, know did not happen.  There were at least six people who worked on 6th that night between 4PM and until after midnight on July 11/12, and none of us reported any smoke.  

— The back wall exhaust fans were on, on 5 that night, not 6. Those fans began pulling smoke down the elevators and the escalator after midnight from the 6th floor.

So what really happened at NPRC and why?

Just a few days before I discovered fellow VRA janitor and neighbor Terry’s body, I had resigned my GSA janitor position (with its federal health insurance coverage) as I was in training to become a Respiratory Therapy tech. (RT) through my community college.  Some 3 months after the fire, I applied to St. Joseph Hospital in St. Charles, Missouri, and they hired me as an RT trainee.  Four or five days after I started my new job at the hospital, my life changed again.  On Friday night, during my 4th night on my new job, the St. Charles County Sheriff visited me at work and escorted me across the street to the Sheriff’s Office where they interviewed me about Terry’s suicide, his note, and their belief that drugs were being stolen from the hospital.  The next morning, in Champaign, Illinois, I broke my leg playing rugby against the University of Illinois and I had to quit my (new) job at the St. Charles Hospital.  I went from being a full-time college student, and full-time new employee, to becoming unemployed and laying in a hospital bed in mid-Illinois. The next week, a rugby teammate picked me up at the hospital and drove me back home from Champaign to St. Louis in his back seat.  He dropped me off at my sister’s home, as my family had moved me out of my rural rented cabin next to where Terry had lived, and I was technically now a homeless veteran with a broken leg.  Another of my rugby buddies who was also a veteran, told me about the VA Work Study student program where if approved by VA, you could be paid the federal minimum wage, tax free, for doing volunteer work with veterans for up to 250 hours a semester.  Anyway, I contacted the Veterans Affairs office at my community college and inquired, and was told there were no work study slots available on campus, BUT, that a group of veterans from seven different campuses in St. Louis had formed a Veterans Consortium, and they were starting a free walk in “Veteran Service Center” (VSC) near Overland, in an American Legion Post (Post 212), and they had some Work Study slots available if I was interested.  Since I needed income, I said yes, and that marked the beginning of what became my unexpected career.  For some 21+ years (1974-1995), the VSC helped thousands of veterans address a wide variety of their needs, aspirations and opportunities, and my work leading the VSC led to consulting work for the Carter White House, the US Department of Labor, the Veterans Administration, the FDIC, and other organizations including the Agent Orange Class Assistance Program (AOCAP).  I volunteered and served on many committees in Missouri, and in DC, including for various members of Congress.  At the end of my career, after many years of volunteer work, including helping draft legislation for Congress, I spent the final 12 years of my career working in DC as the first Associate Administrator for Veterans Business Development in government history.  In that position, it was my privilege and my authorized responsibility to initiate, design, create and implement the entrepreneurial and small business development programs, policies, and resources available today supporting America’s entrepreneurial veterans, active service members, Reserve and National Guard members and their immediate family members.

During my time working in St. Louis, and later, while working in DC as a career employee in the Senior Executive Service (SES), and witnessing the Pentagon fire from the attacks on 9/11, the NPRC fire, its inconclusive investigations, and its impacts on potentially millions of veterans and their families continued to bother me as I never believed the fire was somehow just an unexplained accident. The NPRC fire was just WAY TOO BIG, WAY TOO FAST and is still a memorable night 50+ years ago. In addition, my now lifelong work with veterans and their families informed me that perhaps the fire had deprived millions of veterans and their families their opportunity to know their families’ true history of military service and/or that the fire had somehow deprived millions of veterans their chance for a fair and accurate adjudication decision from the US Department of Veterans Affairs because the veterans’ DOD military records no longer existed, weren’t complete, or were only partially reconstructed by the National Archives or the VA from alternative sources that often lacked the necessary details or proof. 

Because of my interest in historical research, I frequently visited the SBA history library, the National Archives, and the Library of Congress. One day, while reading a book that included information about the Watergate scandal from 1971, 1972, and 1973, I noticed that the now famous, but then secret Nixon White House Taping system that led to the resignation of the President of the United States of America (POTUS in DC talk) was last used on Thursday, July 12, 1973, the very same day the NPRC fire (was?) started in St. Louis, and one day before it was revealed to investigators of the Senate Watergate Committee.

Let me be clear, I DO NOT KNOW if the Nixon Administration and its infamous “Dirty Tricks” campaign was somehow responsible for the infamous NPRC fire in 1973. But I can tell you that given my reading of now many books on the Watergate investigation, coupled with my 50-year interest in the 1973 NPRC fire itself, I can’t help but wonder.

Now we all know that what is referred to as the “Watergate” scandal was and is a huge and complex historical political story that includes Cuban/CIA Bay of Pigs veterans; “Plumber” veterans’  multiple break-ins; the CIA itself; FBI investigations and firings; Committees of both Houses of our Congress; and officials operating at the highest levels of the White House and Nixon administration. It involved the political use of the IRS; hush money donations; and investigations of antiwar organizations including the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. There was the White House Huston Plan; the G. Gordon Liddy/White House Gemstone Plan; the plan to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, by burglarizing his psychiatrist’s office; and the proposed plan to firebomb the DC-based Brookings Institution. There were numerous wiretaps, myriad government leaks, frequent undercover investigations of civil rights leaders and groups, the incalculable destruction of government records, etc. etc. etc.

We know that the NPRC fire was massive, that arson was suspected and never proven, that the fire was responsible, at least partially, for one death, that some 16,000,000 to 18,000,000 veterans’ records were destroyed or damaged and thousands of those records are still being reconstructed to this day by the National Archives and Records Administration. We don’t know how many claims have been denied by the VA for now 50+ years based on damaged, destroyed, or unfindable individuals’ military records.  

We know that the Adjutant General Center in Washington, DC, created a Master Survey of United States Army Records held in Federal Records in May 1978, a survey that began in 1976, and that includes a report on the examination of holdings and findings in the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri. Included with those holdings were 553,000 cubic feet of US Army retired records. In addition, 5400 linear feet of this collection were security classified. The report states that a large percentage of this material is TOP SECRET, and that “originally, these holdings were stored in the 6th floor vault of the National Personnel Records Center.” 

We were informed by an Associated Press article in July 2023 that “there is no definitive list of what was inside the (6th floor) vault in 1973,” even though Warren Griffin said in his February 1975 memo that he’d assembled “descriptive listings” of the incinerated records.

We also know that some records were removed from the 6th floor VIP/Secrets Vault after the fire was finally put out and those records were taken to the local public gas utility under guard and then more records were destroyed in 1975 in the public utilities incinerator. Huh?

We also understand that 2 unidentified gentlemen entered the NPRC at the eastern (or back) entrance at about 11:45 pm on July 11, 1973? 

Anyway, given the huge unexplained NPRC fire, the huge Watergate scandal, and the investigations that reached no conclusions, I have many unresolved questions. I applaud the ongoing heroic work still being performed by NARA staff daily on partially burned records that represent the lost heritage of millions of veterans’ families, etc.

I guess for me, in closing, if anyone out there ever finds the real answer to what really happened that night in St. Louis over a half century ago and you can prove it, please let me know as I too would like to find the truth in what happened that night so many years ago. 

–Bill Elmore, March 2024