It seems that on the Friday night after the quake, a cop had seen him going into a house whose residents had been ordered out just ahead of the fire. There were actually two cops together, but they split up when they heard the distinctive crash of a breaking window on the next street. One went to investigate that, the other followed GF, and when the cop came through the back door after him, GF panicked and bashed him with the fireplace poker. It killed the man, or anyway GF assumed it did, but instead of just running away, he thought he'd conceal the evidence by burning the house. What was one more burning building when the whole city was up in flames?

But being GF, a couple of problems came up. The first was that the bottle of gasoline GF found in the pantry and poured around the floor didn't just burn when he set a match to it, it went up like high explosive, shooting GF out of the house and scorching off all his hair. The other problem was, the fire shifted and didn't eat up that street, so after the fire died down, there was one house burned among a bunch still standing. And in that house was a dead cop with a broken skull and a fireplace poker lying next to him.

GF had buttoned the box of money inside his shirt to leave his hands free when the gas went off in his face, and when he picked himself off the ground and found he could walk, he did so. Eventually he more or less passed out, and was taken to a hospital tent, but as soon as he came to on Saturday he figured it wouldn't be healthy to be a scorched man with a box full of money.

So he came to me.

And I bought his way to freedom, leaving me with a tin box so badly dented that I understood why the hospital workers hadn't looked inside—when I dug it up, I had to use a hammer and screwdriver to get it open. It had money in it, but only about $1700, and some of that had what looked to me like blood on it. Talk about your blood money.

The other thing it had was a band of cloth with a red cross painted on it. Dressed as a rescue worker, GF had gone in and out of houses under the pretense of looking for injured people, when all the while he'd been robbing them blind.