Trial by Fire

The state's case was circumstantial but clear-cut. Pourghafari was a married man with children, in love with a woman half his age. His wife would eventually find out.

From McClellan's offhand remark about Alley's alleged discontent, the prosecution decided it had located a motive: Pourghafari's young mistress was pressuring him for money and maybe for a deeper commitment. Worried that the situation would spiral and his wife would discover the affair, he decided to set the fire, they deduced.

If he was a murderer, Pourghafari appeared to be a repentant one. Witnesses who encountered Pourghafari in the days after Alley's death said he was clearly grief-stricken. His mechanic testified that, when Kaz brought his truck back for more repairs the day of the murder, he was distraught and teary-eyed.

Pourghafari ended up taking Alley's body home to West Virginia to her family, apologizing profusely for failing to rescue their daughter and paying all expenses. It failed to impress her sister, Diana Kay Perdue.

"I believe in my heart that Kaz killed my sister, and I believe that he should pay with his life for committing this murder," she told police, though they noted Pourghafari even purchased the burial plot next to his mistress', intending it for his own future grave.

At least one juror, Mary Barnes, thought Kaz was being targeted because of his heritage.

"I really sincerely think they pinpointed him because he was from the Middle East," Barnes says. "Honest to God."

Dutko also believes Kaz's heritage may have been reason enough for some to feel uncomfortable around him. "He bears a physical resemblance to Saddam Hussein," he says.

Kaz Pourghafari was almost 18 when the Iranian navy sent him to study abroad in 1978. He didn't know English but with help from translators took electronics courses. When the shah fell and the ayatollah came to power in 1980, he decided to defect. He'd already married Linda. When he officially dodged the draft during the Iran/Iraq war, a death warrant was issued for him in his home country. He never again saw the family he left behind.

He attended college in Minnesota, where he got a digital engineering degree by relying on textbooks, Webster's, and a Persian/English dictionary. He and Linda moved to South Florida in 1981 and bought an acre in Plantation. Pourghafari built a house there by consulting library books. He joined with Woodcock, who had started a computer company in his garage, and by 1998, Courtesy Computers on Griffin Road had 12 employees.

The accent he took from Iran remains, as well as a guileless way of speaking that Dutko says police exploited. "You can learn a language, but it takes decades to really appreciate nuances — and every nuance was spun against him in this investigation."

Pourghafari now says that he didn't want to disclose the affair at first but never hid the fact that the two were close and that he was "a support person in her life," as he told police. "I'm not saying a physical relationship wasn't there," he adds today. "But it's oceans apart from what people think."

Dutko and defense fire investigator John Lentini went after the prosecution arson expert, claiming that fire departments like Davie's still use methods issued in the 1980s via the National Bureau of Standards but widely debunked today. Basic assumptions once accepted as gospel truth — such as insisting that spalled concrete and crazed glass are caused by rapid heating (code words for arson) when such conditions are actually caused by rapid cooling — are now being reconsidered.

"Guys are taught myths, year after year after year," says Lentini, a veteran investigator who has worked with the Innocence Project on cases involving defendants on death row for arson crimes for which they were ultimately exonerated.

"In the fire investigation business," he continues, "the people who do the work are not scientists; they're cops. The guy may or may not have gone to college, and if he did, he probably majored in criminal justice, not science."

In Pourghafari's case, the investigator was Davie fire marshal and former police officer Jarred Wiseman, who had had 40 hours of training in "fire chemistry" and 40 in "cause and origin." His lack of experience may have been a factor in the trial, had he not already left the force amid charges that he sold city-issued radios and scanners on eBay.

Prosecutor Cavanagh credits his adversaries' skill in placing doubt in the juries' collective mind. "The evidence is what it is," he sighs. "I don't want to criticize the jury. The defense had a magnificent lawyer and highly paid experts to testify."

Dutko says that, as part of his investigation, he was spending Saturdays boning up on fire physics, scouring every report and document about the case. But it wasn't until November 2002 that he noticed something useful to the defense.

After the fire was out, he learned, crews set up PPVs — positive pressure ventilators — to blow smoke outside. The huge fans are heavy, Dutko read, and they're full of gas. They're even refilled by hand from a gas can. When Dutko learned that at least one PPV had been used in the threshold of Alley's bedroom that day, he knew the contamination in the bedroom could have come from there.