The Heart Of The Fire

By Rita Healy/Denver and Leslie Berestein/Dunlap

John Barton had been honoring the unwritten rule: he could visit his two daughters, but then he would have to leave; there would be no staying over. His wife Terry Lynn expected that of him. She had stopped counting on him for anything else. Their marriage had failed. His friends and family say he had been verbally abusive; they complained about his drinking ("mean, ugly," said his brother) and that he found it difficult to deal with her commitment to her part-time job as a forest ranger. "He just wanted her devoted to him," says a friend. She wanted a divorce and was adamant about it. But on June 3, according to a friend of Terry's, John refused to leave. He dug in for the next four days. On June 7, an exasperated Terry put toiletries, a blow-dryer and clothes in a backpack and headed for a co-worker's home.

As Terry's friends tell the story, she would find something incendiary in the backpack. Terry told her mother that daughters Tasha, 17, and Brandy, 13, apparently slipped in a years-old letter from their father expressing a love now long withered and seeking a reconciliation that had come and gone. The children may have hoped the words would still have force. If so, Terry's relatives say, they were too much for her to bear. She had dropped out of high school to have a baby with John; she stuck with him through 18 years and moved from California to Colorado to save the marriage. She had prayed that life with him would change. But it didn't. As Peggy Hernandez, a colleague of Terry's in California, told TIME, "John says all the words but doesn't mean anything."

According to forensic experts, on the afternoon of June 8, Terry Lynn Barton didn't just strike a match; she struck three--in multiple defiance of the fire ban she was duty-bound to enforce in Colorado's sun-sere parks. Barton eventually confessed that she got out of her truck, headed for a campfire circle, lighted the two-page letter and left once it had burned. Soon after, she returned to find grass burning. As the first-response forestry fire fighter, she radioed for help and began containment efforts. But the prosecutor alleges that she wanted the fire to spread--and whatever her intent, that's what it did. The flames leaped at the rate of a foot per second, engulfing more than 136,000 acres to become the largest conflagration in Colorado's history. Barton's admission--seven days after the inferno began--made it clear that the catastrophe is more than an unfathomable act of God in a season of at least 18 major Western wildfires. Named the Hayman fire--by Barton herself--after a pioneer homestead in the area, it should be called the Barton blaze for the tragic, confused humanity at its heart.

Barton is the most despised woman in Colorado, as hated as Mrs. O'Leary after her cow kick started the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The fire has forced the evacuation of 8,000 people southwest of Denver and northwest of Colorado Springs, and could cost $50 million. Smoke detectors 30 miles away continue to go peep-peep-peep as the haze spreads. More than 1,700 fire fighters are battling the flames, including the boyfriend of the older Barton girl. Four fire fighters from Oregon died when their van crashed while on the way to help fight the Barton blaze.

At Barton's arraignment, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Conner, who is prosecuting the case, declared Barton had intentionally disturbed the campfire circle to allow flames to travel out into the forest. He charged that there had been no letter; that John Barton denied ever writing letters to her; that her love-gone-bad story was the silly fiction of a cornered firebug. If found guilty on four arson charges, she will face 17 to 65 years in prison.

Terry's public defender had no difficulty finding character witness after character witness to vouch for her: colleagues, her boss's boss, fire fighters and forest volunteers, all uncowed by public anger, standing by a friend who they said had made an unthinkable mistake. The judge denied the government's request to lock her up without bail; if she manages to raise 10% of her $600,000 bond, she can await trial in a halfway house.

Her own home, 9,500 ft. above sea level, is a bright red frame house, with a hummingbird feeder, three or four cats, a chocolate Lab named Charma and a spectacular view of Pikes Peak. Visitors can see the plumes of the Hayman fire from the house, but the property is a model of caution. The firewood and the wood splitter are placed well away from the house, in accordance with Forest Service fireproofing guidelines. There's a golden eagle in the area; a black-bear sow comes and goes so freely it is practically a neighbor. Five times a week, to keep in shape for her job, Barton jogged down the 3.3 miles from the house to County Road 1 and then back up. Her mother Sue Haddock told TIME, "Terry loved that job so much it was pitiful. She worked so hard for everything she had, and for those two girls." (Her sister Carla is taking care of the Barton girls. John Barton could not be reached; his mother says he's now at a job in Northern California.)

Terry grew up in Dunlap, Calif. After she dropped out of high school at the end of her junior year, she earned money by cooking and cleaning at a dude ranch and toiling in a fruit-packing shed, where she boxed oranges, peaches and nectarines. She soon realized that John, a carpenter who worked hard from one construction job to the next, had problems and did not have the kind of ambition she was discovering in herself. "He's not kind of a go-getter," says her friend Hernandez. While caring for two children, Terry enrolled in an adult-education class in 1992, got her high school diploma--and a job as a ranger.

She loved the outdoors, but working for the Forest Service was no picnic. Hernandez says Terry would mark timber for loggers, using spray paint that the wind blew into her face even as trees came crashing down around them. She went on ground patrol, sometimes stumbling over a corpse or a marijuana crop. Hernandez says she and her friend were victims of a sexual-harassment case, which was not settled to their satisfaction. That may have been one reason Barton decided to leave California in 1994. Another reason: to try to save her marriage.

"The first year they came back at Christmas," Hernandez recalls, "they were such a happy family. But it started to degenerate." Even as Barton received promotions at work, says Hernandez, the marriage was dying: "She'd come in really dragged out, really bummed out." John would come and go. By last Christmas, Barton wanted him to sign divorce papers. But he refused.

"The relationship had gone sour," says Connie Work, Haddock's neighbor in Dunlap and a spokeswoman for the family. Barton found the letter from John on the job, says Work, and just had to destroy it. "She never intended to cause what happened. She did her best, almost killing herself to put the fire out." But the cataclysm had been unleashed. "Some things," says Work, "just get out of control." If there was a letter, how those words must have burned.