The Heart Of The Fire

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.