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The arsonist stood in the doorway of their bedroom and threw a flame onto the accelerant poured at the foot of their bed.

The flame — maybe from a match, or a lighter, or candle — touched the vapour from the accelerant — maybe lighter fluid or paint thinner, barbecue fluid or kerosene — and immediately ignited.

The technical term for what happened next is a “flash fire.” A powerful blaze that burns fast and hot.

“Your walls are on fire. Your floor’s on fire. Your bed’s on fire,” said provincial fire investigator Dave Emberlin, speaking directly to the jury. “The bedroom is essentially a bonfire.”

“You go from a fire in a room to a room on fire.”

Alan and Carla Rutherford were in that room when it ignited around 3:30 a.m. Carla made it into the hallway, where she died. Alan collapsed on the neighbour’s porch, but managed to use his final words to tell several witness that his stepson Rich “firebombed” his childhood home. And that he did it for the money.

Richard Taylor, 46, is on trial for two counts of first-degree murder. He is accused of burning Carla, 64, and Alan, 63, alive in their Dundas home in order to inherit $400,000 from his mother’s estate. The jury has heard Rich, a married school teacher with two small children, was deep in debt and keeping it a secret from his wife.

On the day of the fire — July 9, 2018 — Rich owed at least $235,000. All the cash he had access to amounted to just $483.38.

Emberlin, who works with the Office of the Fire Marshall, spent two days examining the gutted ranch-style house at 8 Greening Crt. There was no roof and no floor, so plywood had to be laid down for him to walk on.

“To have a fire, you need three things,” he told the jury. “A fuel load, oxygen and a heat source sufficient to ignite whatever combustible it is.”

He began at the scene by determining where the fire originated.

There was no “fire pattern” on the exterior of the house to support an “area of origin” outside.

The fire began inside the house.

While there was smoke damage and soot throughout the home, only one room had a fire pattern “to support an area of origin.”

That was the master bedroom.

There, the fire had burned so intensely the entire ceiling collapsed and was “open to the sky.” It burned a hole through the floor so the basement could be seen. The drywall had collapsed. The wall studs were charred. The wall on the other side of the studs — in the bathroom — looked strangely white and clean.

Emberlin explained that when a fire burns hot and long enough, it actually burns the soot away. That’s called a clean burn.

“The window is completely gone. The frame is melted out, the glass is gone, the entire window frame is gone.” By the bits of glass on the floor below the window, Emberlin determined the bedroom window had been slid open.

The door into the bedroom was also gone. Also open.

The only thing left of the queen-sized bed was the metal frame and some metal pieces from the box spring. The mattress was completely incinerated.

“Direct flame impingement” is the term for those places scorched by flames.

But where exactly in the bedroom did the fire start?

The hole in the floor was at the foot of the bed. That, Emberlin testified, was where it began, burning longer and hotter than anywhere else.

Oxygen flowed between the open window and open bedroom door to feed the flames.

Next, Emberlin needed to determine what caused the fire.

He got on his hands and knees with a trowel and carefully dug through debris. There were no faulty electrical wires in the room, he said.

He took samples of debris from various areas in the room and sent them to the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto for testing.

The results showed the floor at the foot of the bed, up each side of the bed and under the bed had been soaked with a “medium petroleum distillate.” That is where the flammable liquids come in. They produce a vapour that instantly ignites when touched by a flame.

If it was poured on the floor, an arsonist could “light a match and toss it to the floor” to set a fire, Emberlin told the court.

He did not find a fuel container or a broken bottle that might indicate a Molotov cocktail or a cigarette lighter.

“It’s a fire where it shouldn’t be,” Emberlin concluded. “It’s an intentionally set fire. Which is arson.”

Under cross-examination by defence lawyer Jennifer Penman, Emberlin was asked if the arsonist might not have tossed a flame onto the flammable liquid. What if the arsonist reached out to it, while holding the flame? Could they have done that, been burned and run away?

Emberlin’s answer was blunt. “You couldn’t have been in the room and done this,” he said, “because you wouldn’t have got very far.”

Over and over at the trial, Penman has asked witnesses who saw Taylor in the days after the murders if they noticed any burn marks on his body.

Every witness has said no.

But the trial has also seen a security video from a nearby home taken in the minutes before the fire.

It shows a shadowy figure pacing in the dark, then sparks of light descending toward the ground.

Like someone lighting a match and tossing it.

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