Evidence is stacking up against accused arsonists

By Noah R. Bombard

Just because you don't see a police car in the rearview mirror, doesn't mean they can't see you.

When two ex-cons from Clinton allegedly took a midnight drive to an abandoned Erving paper mill last month, they likely had little idea a global positioning device placed in their truck, communicating with a satellite orbiting the Earth, was tracking their every move. It tracked them as they drove there. Tracked them as their truck sat there for 16 minutes. And it tracked them as they left.

Forty-eight minutes later, an alarm sounded as the mill went up in flames in a fire that brought firefighters from 20 towns.

Those GPS logs, used by authorities to track Clinton residents John Rousseau and Michael Dreslinski on July 30 and 31, will likely be a key piece of evidence in a case against the two 28-year-old men who were arraigned Monday, charged with setting the Erving mill on fire. Sound like a strong case? Rousseau's been there before — and dodged it.

For nearly three years, Rousseau was under house arrest, battling charges he'd burned down four abandoned buildings in his hometown. The prime piece of evidence: When police interviewed him, he confessed to starting them all. It was shaping up to be an airtight case. Pushing hard for a conviction was then-District Attorney John Conte's Office. That's when the floor fell out from under the DA's feet. Superior Court Judge Peter Agnes Jr. threw out Rousseau's confession, citing the fact that Rousseau hadn't taken his psychiatric meds when he confessed. The case was dismissed. Rousseau was free.

But the case against Rousseau and Dreslinski is building again. In addition to being charged with the July 30 Erving fire, police told the Telegram & Gazette earlier this week that the two men are "subjects of interest" in a fire in Sterling on Aug. 12 that destroyed a house made famous by the girl who brought her lamb to school in the poem "Mary Had a Little Lamb." Like the Erving fire and the four Clinton fires authorities couldn't stick to him, the home was abandoned and empty.

And there are others. In fact, Holden Police Chief George Sherrill told Worcester Magazine the arrest of Rousseau and Dreslinski "raises the scrutiny level" for a number of arson fires throughout the area this year. And there are a lot of them.

"I can't speak to specific cases, but there seems to be a level of escalation in minor fires, and fires in port-a-potties, sheds and empty buildings," Sherrill says.

In fact, at least three other abandoned buildings have succumbed to fires this summer, all determined to be arson — although Rousseau and/or Dreslinki have yet to be connected to any of them. An empty Bendix Corporation plant in Greenfield burned on July 8, the Bernat Mill in Uxbridge went up in flames on July 21 and nine firefighters were treated for injuries. A barn in Holden burned to the ground Aug. 13 — one day after the fire in Sterling.

Rousseau isn't a stranger to Greenfield police. A Greenfield detective told the Times & Courier newspaper in February, five months before the Bendix fire, that they were looking at Rousseau in connection with other suspicious activities in town. Sherrill says the duo is well known to police in many towns.

"This past summer, the two of them were in our town at all hours of the night and morning," he says.

Sherrill said Rousseau's and Dreslinski's multi-town travels are what led to the case being prosecuted by the state Attorney General's Office.

The investigation "was starting to cross so many towns and counties," he says.

The Clinton fires weren't the beginning of the dangerous duo's troubles, however.

Both Rousseau and his bad-boy pal Dreslinski first earned adult criminal records in 1996. Rousseau spent six months in jail for vandalizing the Florence Sawyer School in Bolton, where he and Dreslinski spray-painted a swastika on a wall, emptied fire extinguishers and oxygen tanks, and stole a telephone booth, among other items. His history since has followed suit with a string of convictions ranging from bashing two skunks to death with a trash can lid and tossing the carcasses into a neighbor's yard, to breaking and entering, impersonating a police officer and possession of burglary tools, among others convictions. A plethora of other charges brought by police over the years haven't stuck.

"... Fires in vacant buildings are the most dangerous for our firefighters," State Fire Marshal Stephen Coan said in a press release this week. "They are four times as likely to be injured in vacant-building arsons than building fires in general."

Police say of the two suspects, Rousseau is known as an electronics whiz kid. Ironically, it is technology in the form of a GPS device that could prove crucial in the case.

The two men were being held without bail in the Franklin County House of Correction this week. Both entered pleas of innocent. A hearing today will decide whether bail will be set. o