West Hartford arsonist death ends state’s pursuit of fine
On his 79th birthday, William Beckerman was sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $40,000 for setting fire to his large West Hartford home a year earlier.
In sentencing Beckerman on May 11, 2010, Hartford Superior Court Judge Thomas V. O’Keefe Jr. acknowledged the 10-year sentence might amount to a life sentence for the West Hartford arsonist.
And it did. Beckerman died April 27, 2017, at a Rocky Hill nursing home, still in the custody of the state Department of Correction.
But Beckerman was back on the docket Thursday in Superior Court in Hartford because one matter related to his sentence was never resolved — the $40,000 fine O’Keefe imposed after finding Beckerman guilty of two counts of first-degree arson for torching his home at 27 The Crossways on Feb. 11, 2009.
Prosecutor Donna Mambrino, who presented the state’s case against Beckerman at his 2010 trial, told Hartford Superior Court Judge Laura F. Baldini on Thursday that the court clerk’s office had placed the case on the docket to resolve the fine issue.
No estate was ever probated for Beckerman after his death, and the property on which the burned out wreckage of his house sat was sold in 2012 for far less than Beckerman owed the bank and the federal government for fines assessed after a tax evasion conviction.
The judge had little choice but to cancel the fine, which she did.
Throughout his trial and afterward, Beckerman maintained his innocence, insisting a faulty furnace caused the fire. The judge rejected that claim and the evidence presented by an expert Beckerman hired to testify on his behalf.
Instead, the judge found credible the mountain of evidence Mambrino presented, much of it discovered by insurance company arson investigators.
State police and insurance company investigators picking through the wreckage of Beckerman’s home found evidence of a gasoline/kerosene mixture that had been poured throughout the basement and paper that was wound through a dresser and over other furniture and then stuck into a lawn mower’s gas tank.
Photographs of the lawn mower submitted as evidence during the trial were key, the judge said. Those photos “are pictures of an arsonist’s calling card,” the judge said. “There is no innocent explanation of a gas tank with a wick in it.”
The judge also found the images of the paper — wound through a dresser and over couches — important in reaching his decision. “These were not planted by the insurance investigators,” O’Keefe said. “These are devices to spread the fire. No other explanation.”
The 2009 fire was not the first time Beckerman had a home burn under suspicious circumstances. In 1973, his home at 14 Winchester Drive in West Hartford was consumed by a blaze so intense that much of the house collapsed into the basement. The cause of that fire was never determined and the Hartford Fire Insurance Co. initially refused to pay Beckerman’s claim. The company relented after Beckerman and his wife, Charlotte, sued the company, saying they were owed $654,000 for the loss.