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The residents of a small lake town in the state of Washington could have never prepared themselves for what happened in early 1999. A string of crimes that almost seemed more fiction than reality. They involved murder, arson, fraud and embezzlement, and it involved suicide.
How could the use of advanced forensic science techniques finally bring the town the justice they so desperately need? This week on Forensic Tales, we cover the serial killer. ♪
Welcome to Forensic Tales. As always, I'm your host, Courtney. Each
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Hi, Forensic Tales listeners, and happy Memorial Day. Our story this week involves not only murder and forensic science, but it also involves arson. It has fraud and embezzlement, and it even has suicide. And it takes place in a town called Newman Lake, Washington, which is a place just about 20 miles from the city of Spokane.
Newman Lake is an unincorporated part of Washington that's pretty much trees on top of trees. And one of its residents, Robert, or Bob, Wood, who was 42 years old at the time, and his two children, 16-year-old Teresa Wood and 11-year-old Christopher Wood, moved to Newman Lake right after Bob became divorced from his second wife.
And at the time, Bob gained custody of both children and they all settled in to Newman Lake as a new family of three. In early 1999, Bob Wood worked in the real estate business there in Washington at a company called Crown West Realty.
and he was making some pretty decent money there. His reported salary was well over $100,000. I mean, that's a pretty decent paycheck here in 2020. So I would imagine that over $100,000 a year back in the late 90s was a pretty darn good salary. And I would certainly be pretty happy with that kind of salary.
And Bob Wood built a pretty nice home and life for himself and his two young children. He purchased the home in Newman Lake for around $80,000. He purchased a trampoline for the backyards for the kids to play on. He put in a new garage and he even put a nice new jacuzzi right there in his master bedroom.
On February 9th, 1999, 16-year-old Teresa Wood, Bob's older daughter, headed out of the house a little after 8 o'clock in the morning for school. Because she's in high school, she's usually the first one out of the house in the morning, and she usually leaves well before her dad, Bob, leaves the house for work. And her younger brother heads out of the house for middle school.
So once Teresa leaves the house, Bob also leaves for work around 8:20 AM that morning, which leaves 11 year old Christopher alone in the house.
Now, I don't know if it's exactly wise to leave just an 11-year-old behind alone before school. Maybe it's only for just a few minutes each morning, but hey, I am not a parent yet, so I guess I cannot be the judge of any parenting styles here.
So Christopher stays behind in the home alone. He finishes up his breakfast and then it's time for him to leave the house and head to school himself. So Bob Wood goes to work around 8.20 a.m. His son Christopher leaves the house a few minutes after that.
But then, around 8.30 a.m., a neighbor of Bob's sees thick black smoke coming from the middle part of the house and quickly calls 911. The neighbors have no idea who is inside the house, but what they know for sure is that the house is completely engulfed in flames.
Newman Lake firefighters are able to put the fire out, but not before the fire did some pretty extensive damage on the house. The whole middle section of the house was practically burnt down to the ground. And neighbors knew that Bob left the house to go check on some property up north of Spokane that morning and that Bob's older daughter, Teresa, had already left for high school.
The neighbors told firefighters that they weren't sure that if Bob's younger son Christopher had left the house yet or not.
The neighbor starts frantically calling Bob, trying to get a hold of him on his cell phone, but he can't seem to get in touch with him. And after calling Bob on his cell phone for about an hour, Bob finally picks up the phone and says that he's about 40 minutes away from the house and that he's on his way.
He shows up at the house about two hours later around 10.30 a.m. and he tells police that he's concerned that his son Christopher has had problems in the past of playing with matches and that it's possible that his son may have started the fire right there inside the house and maybe he ran off because he was scared.
Now, one of Bob's neighbors, Ron Adamson, had already started looking for Christopher. He went around the house looking for any sign of footprints in the snow. He got into his car and he started driving around the neighborhood just looking for any sign of Christopher.
And firefighters start frantically searching through the house to look for any signs that Christopher may have still been inside the house when the fire started. But they were pretty quickly able to determine that there was no sign of Christopher or a body or anything like that inside the house or where the fire started.
But if Christopher wasn't inside the house, the next concern was that he may have started the fire himself, like what his father Bob had already suggested to the police. Remember, he's only 11 years old, so I think if I accidentally started a fire inside my dad's house even close to that age, I would probably run away too. I mean, you couldn't really blame the kid if that's exactly what happened.
Now, flyers with Christopher's face were posted everywhere throughout the town. And pretty quickly after the fire, a search party was formed to start searching for Christopher throughout the community and nearby fields. He was last seen wearing a Dallas Cowboys jacket, and he was only about four feet tall.
So Christopher's dad, Bob, goes on a local news station pretty much begging his son to return home, pretty much certain that he's run away. Bob says, hey, please come home. You aren't in any trouble. We just want you to come home. By now, a full-on manhunt begins to find Christopher. I mean, he's only 11 years old.
The day after the fire, Christopher's Dallas Cowboy backpack is discovered about 15 miles away from the house. And it was apparent that the backpack belonged to Christopher because his name had been printed on the outside and inside the backpack were Christopher's inline skates. But it was just the backpack. There's still no sign of Christopher anywhere.
Washington State firefighters brought in fire dogs to basically help them in the investigation. Because again, it was pretty clear that the fire had been started on purpose. This was not some sort of accident.
So the fire dogs are called in, they sniff around the house a little bit, but they don't really find anything valuable in the investigation. All they really know by this point is that the fire originated inside of the family room, likely on one of the couches, which again, all points to arson.
By the next morning, people are still searching for missing Christopher. He hasn't been heard or seen by anyone in over 48 hours, which is increasingly concerning for the police and Christopher's family because he is just so young. On that second day, Bob Wood receives the phone call that no parent wants to ever receive.
Bob learns that a snowplower has discovered Christopher's body about 50 miles away in a pile of snow. When police arrive at Christopher's body, it appears that he was likely killed somewhere else and that his body was dumped there.
And that's because police don't find anything around the body and they can tell that the snow around him isn't disturbed at all. It doesn't look like there was a fight or a struggle. So now the police don't just have a case of arson on their hands. Now they have an arson and a homicide to investigate.
Christopher's autopsy revealed ligature marks around his neck and the medical examiner concluded that the likely cause of death was strangulation. Now, it's pretty hard to imagine or even comprehend a little 11-year-old boy being strangled to death. But what was also important about the autopsy was that there weren't any signs that Christopher had started the fire at his dad's house.
There wasn't any smoke or soot on his hands or his clothes. He didn't have any smoke inside of his lungs, nothing. And what was also strange was that Christopher's shoes were on the wrong foot, like the left shoe was on the right and vice versa. Not something that you would expect to see for a kid who ran off after starting a house fire.
He also had what looked like vomit all over himself. Now with the understanding that Christopher didn't start the fire at his dad's house and the medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, the question became, who started the fire? And now, who killed Christopher? Was it the same person? Was it two different people? Are they related? Are they not?
Police needed to find out the answers to so many unanswered questions. Washington police originally thought that this might be the crime of a sex offender, largely because Christopher was so young, only 11 years old. And this is a type of crime that we see from sex offenders who target young children.
And the police found out pretty quickly that there were a handful of known sex offenders who lived right there in Christopher's neighborhood. But Christopher's autopsy didn't reveal any evidence that he had been sexually assaulted either before or after his death. There just wasn't any evidence of that.
So without any evidence of a sexual assault, it's not really likely that a local sex offender in the area would have killed him, let alone start the fire inside the home. That just doesn't fit the MO of what we see and what we know about sex offenders and their choices of crimes. So with the idea that a sex offender likely wasn't responsible for Christopher's death,
Police then turn to his older sister Teresa and father Bob to basically try and get any additional information that might help them find their killer.
And according to Teresa, she was the first one out of the family house that morning. That was the normal routine for the family, was that she left the house the earliest to get to high school. And Bob said pretty much the same thing, that Teresa went to school early and that he left the house around 8.20 in the morning to get to work, leaving Christopher behind to finish his breakfast.
And neighbors of Bob reported to police that no one remembers seeing Christopher at any point that morning. Police have a couple more questions for Bob. And the first question that raised a couple eyebrows in the investigation was the fact that it took Bob almost two hours after getting the phone call about the fire to come back home.
I mean, if someone called and told me that my house was on fire, I think I would probably get home faster than the person could even tell me what was happening on the phone. So when you tell me that it took him two hours to get home, of course that warrants a few follow-up questions.
When the police start looking a little closer into Bob Wood's life, they find out that things weren't exactly as they may appear. For one, remember the $100,000 a year job in real estate he had? Well, when police looked into Bob's finances, they found out that even with a decent salary like that, Bob had a habit of spending well beyond his means.
He was in a lot of personal debt. He was spending way more every month than what his salary would allow. And in fact, he was spending all kinds of money on antique and vintage cars. He just had a lot of expensive hobbies and interests. Reports indicate that around the time of the fire and Christopher's death, Bob Wood owed around $125,000.
But when police dig a little deeper, maybe even more troubling than the debt, was the fact that Bob had actually been fired from his real estate job just a few weeks before the fire and Christopher's murder.
When police speak with Bob's former employer, they learn that Bob was actually fired from the company in January after it was discovered that he was embezzling money. And not just a little amount of money. He was being accused of embezzling $100,000 from the company.
And when the police interviewed a couple of Bob's co-workers, they claimed that in addition to the money, Bob was also stealing all kinds of things from the company, including gas, equipment, and building materials that were owned by the company. Bob's co-workers also claimed that he was using company money to make repairs on his own personal cars.
Police also learned that Bob Wood had also taken out three life insurance policies on his son, Christopher. Bob had originally opened a policy on Christopher for $10,000 just to cover costs of burial services in the event of his death. And Bob's ex-wife, Jolin Wood, had purchased a $50,000 policy on all four of her kids, including Christopher.
According to Bob's ex-wife, the policies were purchased as more of an investment than anything else.
Now, to be completely honest, at first, when I heard about all of these different life insurance policies on these children, I didn't really understand why a parent would do that. But while researching this case, I found out that it's actually pretty common for parents to purchase life insurance on their kids.
And one study I found suggests that one in five policies in the United States are actually for kids under the age of 18. So I guess it's not as uncommon as I originally thought.
But shortly after Bob's ex purchased the $10,000 life insurance policy, she wasn't able to keep up with the premium payments. So Bob took over the policy and he became the sole beneficiary to Christopher's policy.
So again, Bob had recently opened these life insurance policies and when police questioned Bob about them and request copies of the policy, they learned that the insurance policies had actually been conveniently removed from the house prior to the start of the fire.
So Bob cooperates with the police and he gets them the copies of the insurance policies. And he says that he has absolutely nothing to hide here and that he removed the insurance policies prior to the house fire because of this very reason. He wanted to make sure that if anything happened, God forbid, right? He would have all of his important documents, which is why he's so concerned about the
Which, okay, I guess I can understand that part of Bob's story. I mean, isn't that the reason why you buy fireboxes and things like that? So you can put your important documents in. So even though it's slightly a coincidence here, I do understand where Bob is coming from.
So when Bob Wood turns over the life insurance policies to the police, they total up the policies and they find out there was a total of $80,000 taken out on Christopher. Now again, even to Bob's ex-wife accord, the large amount of policies were taken out on Christopher largely to become an investment later on.
After the fire and after the police had in their hands the life insurance policies that were taken out on Christopher, they also found out that Bob had dropped off a camera to have some photos developed at a pharmacy on February 11th. Right, this is back in the 1990s. When you wanted to take photos, you had to go take your camera in to get them developed.
So the photos on the camera that Bob dropped off to have developed contained a ton of photos from inside the house where the fire started. It was basically photo after photo of each room in the house from different angles. And then there were the same exact photos from each room in the house from the same exact angles again.
after the fire had damaged most of the house. The so-called before and after photos were taken on the same roll of film, which in the minds of investigators kind of begs the question, did Bob take these photos because he knew the fire was going to happen?
Crime scene technicians were called in to search Bob Wood's home for any forensic evidence that might explain the house fire or even Christopher's murder. Between the life insurance policies, the suspicious house fire, police had more than enough reason to suspect that Bob knew way more than what he was letting on to. Crime scene technicians start by searching Bob's garage.
Now, the garage was an area of the house that wasn't damaged at all during the fire. So pretty much everything inside was completely untouched. Now, if you recall from earlier, one of Bob's hobbies was collecting expensive cars. So his garage had a number of different cars in it.
And on one of these cars, crime scene technicians spotted an odd substance on one of the car's fenders.
It wasn't car oil or anything like that. It was definitely out of place, not a substance that would be on the fender of a car. So technicians swabbed the fender to collect a sample of the substance and have it tested to figure out exactly what it was.
The test results of the substance found on one of Bob's cars came back as human stomach contents, or vomit in other words. Police were hopeful that the vomit on the car's fender would shed some sort of light on the investigation. But vomit doesn't contain any DNA.
So they weren't testing the stomach contents to pull any DNA evidence from it. They wanted to test to see what exactly they could find in the contents. The stomach contents were sent to a special forensics lab for testing.
The sample was put under a microscope and the examiner could make out a very small vegetative fragments like pieces of oat and other starchy grains. So the sample was removed from the microscope and placed with a mixture of potassium iodine. Potassium iodine is a chemical that is often used in forensic science.
And in this case, scientists use potassium iodine to test the vomit for the presence of different substances. When the iodine solution is applied to the vomit, the starches in the stomach contents will turn a purplish-bluish color, which indicates a positive test result for the presence of starches.
In this case, the potassium iodine came back positive. So, okay, what does all of this really mean? Well, it means that the stomach contents contained a large amount of oat, bran, corn, wheat, a lot of starches. All ingredients that are super common in one of my favorite breakfast choices, cereal.
So police have now concluded that the unknown substance swabbed from Bob's wood car was stomach contents that contained many of the same ingredients as cereal. Meaning whoever that vomit belonged to most likely ate cereal or something very starchy.
As soon as the substance found on the car was identified, forensic scientists were able to match it to the same exact substance that was found on Christopher's shirt when his body was discovered. Christopher also had the same summit contents right there on his shirt with the same starchy evidence.
Forensic and police had suspected that the stomach contents found on Christopher's shirt and on one of Bob's car fenders contained many of the same ingredients as cereal. They really didn't have to look very long because right there inside of Bob's kitchen, there was a half full box of Marshmallow Matey's cereal, which if you didn't know is the generic to Lucky Charms.
Cereal that an 11-year-old Christopher ate each and every single morning before school. Bob Wood's house has two trash cans. But when police searched his property, they could only find one of the trash cans. Police found it to be pretty suspicious that after the fire and the murder of his son, that a trash can was suddenly missing from the house.
Police also knew that Bob had taken his pickup truck to a local car wash the day after the house fire.
So the police head over to the local car wash to see what, if any evidence, could be left behind. Again, investigators didn't have to search very long because right there at the gas station, police found the missing trash can. But did the trash can belong to Bob or
Or was this some weird coincidence that a similar style trash can could also be at the car wash that Bob used just weeks before? It is possible. I'm sure many people in the neighborhood had very similar looking trash cans.
The trash can found at the car wash was sent to the forensic lab for testing, just to see if they could identify the trash can as belonging to Bob Wood or someone else. Forensic scientists use a technique in which they scraped pieces of paint from the top of the trash can to then analyze the paint chips.
The paint residue was placed underneath a forensic microscope to be compared to the paint residue on Bob's remaining trash can. Forensics were able to determine that the paint residue and composition of the trash can found at the car wash were a similar match to the same paint composition as Bob's.
Now that the police could identify where the trash can came from, they needed to find out exactly what had been inside of the can. Investigators used a scanning electron microscope to try and find out what had been inside the trash can. This type of microscope can produce images of a sample by scanning the object's surface with a highly concentrated beam of electrons.
Inside the trash can, scientists found traces of vomit. Vomit that was 100% consistent with the stomach contents found on the car fender and on Christopher's t-shirt. They also found unusual shiny metallic particles inside of the trash can, which at first left police puzzled as to where those shiny pieces could have come from.
But then they remember Christopher's backpack that had been the same exact shiny metallic pieces on it. Armed with the evidence of the stomach contents and pieces of the backpack, police were now certain that Christopher had 100% without a doubt been inside that trash can.
But was this enough evidence to make an arrest in the case? Police felt like they still needed a little bit more. A search of Bob's cell phone records showed that his cell phone pinged a tower right near where Christopher's body was discovered on the morning of the fire, which remember his body was found about 50 miles away from his house.
which lines up with the police timeline of Bob's whereabouts the morning of the fire because it took him two hours to get back to the house after getting the phone call about the fire.
But was it really possible for Bob to have set the fire inside the house, leave at the time he said around 8.20 a.m., and have neighbors spot the smoke around 8.30? It seemed like a pretty tight timeline for everything to fall into place and leave the house undetected. So to test this timeline, the ATF got involved in the case.
And the ATF purchased three similar pieces of furniture where the fire was believed to have started. They wanted to see exactly how long it would take the fire to really get burning and be able to take down most of the house. In order for a fire to basically take over an entire room with flames, the fire has to be generating a lot of energy.
So the ATF start a fire on a similar set of furniture and they watch how long it takes to burn and how much energy it's producing. The ATF concluded that Bob's sofa could have produced the same amount of energy.
Bob Wood was arrested and charged with setting the fire to his own home and strangling his son Christopher on February 26, 1999. That same day, he was also charged with theft of $105,000 from Crown West Realty, the company that he was fired from just one month before.
Police and prosecutors believed that Bob waited for his daughter Teresa to go to school, then strangled Christopher to death with a rope. In the process of being strangled, it's believed that Christopher vomited, explaining the stomach contents. Next, Bob dressed Christopher, putting his shoes on the wrong foot.
He carried Christopher to his pickup truck, where he brushed against the sports car, leaving the stomach contents right there on the car's fender. Christopher was put in the back of the pickup truck inside of the trash can, while Bob went back inside the family home to start the fire.
On his way out of the house, he grabbed Christopher's backpack and headed out the door right at 8.20 a.m. He drove Christopher's body some 50 miles away and dumped it in a snowbank. When Bob Wood received the phone call about the fire, he drove back to the home from the dump site, throwing his son backpack out the window.
Prosecutors believed Bob tried to clean the pickup truck by taking it to a local car wash and leaving the trash can that carried Christopher's body behind. The forensic analysis of the paint proved that the trash can belonged to Bob Wood, and the biological evidence found inside the can also proved that Christopher's body had been placed inside.
How could someone murder their very own 11-year-old son and set fire to their house? Well, prosecutors believed the motive was simple. Money. Bob Wood had taken out three life insurance policies on his son and set fire to his house to gain the insurance money.
Bob was in thousands and thousands of dollars in debt and had already filed for bankruptcy twice. When Bob Wood appeared in court, he adamantly denied all of the charges against him, claiming that he saw his son head out to school that morning and he suggested Christopher himself set the fire and ran off out of fear of getting into trouble.
Bob Wood was now facing arson, murder, and embezzlement charges in the state of Washington. But before his case could ever go to trial, Bob Wood was found hanging in his jail cell in May 1999. He committed suicide before he would ever be held to answer for his crimes.
Even if Bob Wood would have stood trial, the forensic evidence in the case would be nearly impossible to overcome. The identification of the stomach contents containing freshly eaten cereal on Bob's car and inside the trash can placed Christopher inside Bob's car and trash can.
The paint analysis matched the trash can found at the car wash to the missing trash can at Bob's residence. And the work of arson investigators and the ATF put together a perfect timeline that proved Bob had set the fire in his very own house.
What is even more tragic in this case is that the life insurance policies that were taken out on 11-year-old Christopher and the insurance he would have received from the fire wouldn't have even been enough money to pay off all of Bob Wood's debt. It was all for nothing and just simply an act of unspeakable violence.
An article that was published in the Seattle Times shortly after Bob Wood committed suicide inside of a jail cell described Christopher as a pinball kid. Christopher always had to be doing something, whether that was building a fort, riding his bicycle, or just playing video games. He was known around the school as the Tetherball King.
Without a doubt, if Bob Wood was on trial, the forensic evidence would have put away another killer for the rest of his life. Forensic Tales is a Rockefeller Audio Production. The show is written and produced by me, Courtney Fretwell. Sources for this episode include Forensic Files, Season 10, Episode 12, and The Seattle Times.
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