The Toronto Star
GREECE, N.Y. — Police in upstate New York reopened an investigation Wednesday into a 1978 hotel fire that killed 10 people, including seven Canadians.
The Holiday Inn in the Rochester suburb of Greece was crowded with holiday shoppers that Nov. 26, and the fire raced through the hotel in the middle of the night, leaving many unable to escape.
The fire doors were not closed, there was no sprinkler system, the alarms too quiet, so a lot of people did not wake up in time, and the alarms weren’t hardwired to the fire department, said Greece Police Chief Todd Baxter.
When Baxter became chief a year and a half ago, he looked at several of the department’s cold cases, and this one piqued his interest.
He has assigned a task force to reopen the case as a full-blown new investigation and it officially began its work Wednesday.
"(There’s) no smoking gun yet, if you will,” Baxter said. “My biggest fear is that we had a chance for the smoking gun or we had a chance for one little piece of the puzzle to put together and we never took advantage of this.”
Investigators are also going over the evidence to make sure arson could be proven in court if it comes to that, Baxter said. The speed of the spread of the fire certainly indicates arson, he said, as do some suspicious markings and the amount of heat at the lower levels.
The investigation in 1978 was disorganized and there is not enough original evidence, Baxter said.
“We have, for instance, a lack of evidence for a mass murder of 10 people,” he said.
“The amount of evidence we have today is nothing comparable to what we’d take today in a criminal investigation.”
Copyright 2011 Toronto Star Newspapers Limited