N.Y. / REGION

After 36 Years, a New York Town Sifts Through Suspicions on a Fatal Fire

By SUSANNE CRAIGJAN. 18, 2015

The Holiday Inn in Greece, N.Y., after a 1978 fire that killed 10 people. The authorities later ruled it had been deliberately set. CreditRick Delaney

GREECE, N.Y. — No obvious traces remain of the fire that killed 10 people here in 1978, no monument to remind local residents of the arson at the Holiday Inn that left an entire town in tears. A Red Lobster now occupies the spot on a busy road where the motel once stood.

But what Greece lacks in permanent memorials it makes up for in coffee-shop conversations, and opinions, about who set the fire and why justice has never been served.

Thirty-six years later, the blaze — one of the deadliest hotel fires in the state’s history — is still under active investigation. Law enforcement officials say they are close to seeking an indictment; the prime suspect says he is innocent. Yet for people in this working-class town outside Rochester, the story is as much one of local political intrigue as of law and order.

The twist? According to officials briefed on the case, that suspect — who was also the first firefighter to arrive at the scene — is the current fire chief.

“We need to get to the bottom of this,” said Laurie Kingsley-Henry, who was 14 when the Holiday Inn burned down. Like many people in Greece, she has a connection to the fire: Her father was among the firefighters who fought it; she herself was a member of a fire department youth Explorer post at the time.

An aerial view of the Holiday Inn in Greece, N.Y., shortly it was destroyed by a fire that investigators initially labeled an accident. CreditUnited Press International

“To me it is black and white,” she said. “They should have been able to solve it years ago. I think somebody wants to sweep something under the rug.”

Greece, with a population of roughly 96,000, hugs Rochester’s western edge. Its neighborhoods of Cape Cods and ranch-style homes spill north toward the shores of Lake Ontario and surround one of the town’s bigger attractions: the sprawling Mall at Greece Ridge, which in 1978 was among the nation’s largest shopping meccas.

On the weekend after Thanksgiving that year, busloads of Canadians had poured into town to do their Christmas shopping. The 91-room Holiday Inn, a short drive away on Ridge Road, was packed.

Harold J. Phillips, then an off-duty lieutenant with the Ridge Road Fire District, was the first to report the fire, which began in a basement stairwell.

Mr. Phillips, who is both the suspect and the Ridge Road district’s current chief, has always maintained that the fire’s outbreak was accidental. He declined to be interviewed for this article. He told the Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester in 2013 that the suspicion about him had taken a toll. “All these innuendos and rumors out there not only bother me, but are hurtful to my family,” he said.

Chief Phillips’s lawyer, James Nobles, said in a statement on Saturday that there was “no credible evidence” that his client “had any involvement in the fire.”

“I believe, after a thorough investigation, that the fire being an arson is also very questionable,” Mr. Nobles said, adding that he doubted that any presentation of the case to a grand jury was “likely or imminent.”

Harold J. Phillips in 1978. A fire lieutenant at the time, he was the first to report the blaze.CreditBurr Lewis/Democrat and Chronicle

In interviews over the years, Chief Phillips, who is known as Bud, has said he was driving by the Holiday Inn after finishing a moonlighting shift as a security guard when he saw the flames.

His call, just after 2:30 a.m., set off a swell of sirens; 125 firefighters were soon battling a full-on inferno as motel guests leapt from the windows in their pajamas. Dozens were injured. More than 150 people escaped, but 10 did not. Seven of the dead were Canadians, including three women from one family.

“In my world, I was in the right place at the right time,” Chief Phillips told the Democrat and Chronicle in 2013. “My actions saved lives.”

To many in town, though, Chief Phillips, now 66, was no hero.

A local investigator initially called the fire an accident. But an expert fire investigator from New York City, John Stickevers, was quickly brought in. He concluded that the blaze had been deliberately set. The police in Greece had 10 homicides on their hands.

Mr. Stickevers, who retired years later as New York City’s chief fire marshal, recalled in an interview that he first saw Chief Phillips while watching coverage of the fire on television when it happened. He sensed something was off, he said, but could not say exactly what.

His suspicions were heightened, he said, when he arrived in Greece to conduct his inquiry: He asserts that it would have been impossible to see the flames from the street, as Chief Phillips had described.

Other information fleshed out Mr. Stickevers’s picture of what had happened, he said: At the time of the fire, Chief Phillips had been under pressure from his wife’s family to take a better-paying job, at Kodak. Becoming the hero whose quick response had saved lives during the Holiday Inn fire had bolstered his case to remain a firefighter, Mr. Stickevers said.

“Based on the information I was given, he is a viable suspect,” Mr. Stickevers said.

The police questioned Chief Phillips in 1978, but investigators never accumulated enough evidence to bring charges against anyone. The case went cold, and little attention was paid to the fire except on each anniversary. In 1988 it was reported that the police had received an anonymous letter containing new information about a possible suspect, but no arrest followed.

“One of the big questions I have is, why did nothing happen on this case in 30 years when we know they had zeroed in on one person within a day or two of the fire?” said Brian Sundue, a Canadian government official who lives in Ottawa and lost his mother, grandmother and aunt in the fire.

Chief Phillips, meanwhile, rose to become chief in 2001.

The man who may be most responsible for reviving the investigation was born two years after the fire: Anthony Niccoli, a onetime volunteer firefighter who grew up around and was trained by people who responded to the Holiday Inn blaze.

Mr. Niccoli, 34, who is now a corrections officer in Montana, recalled that after graduating from high school, he began to detect what he said was an “undercurrent” of bitterness in the community, with people referring to Chief Phillips, behind his back, as “Torch.”

Laurie Kingsley-Henry, a local resident, says of the case: “We need to get to the bottom of this.”CreditBrendan Bannon for The New York Times

“Sadly, this was almost a running joke in the town,” Mr. Niccoli said.

Mr. Niccoli said he had become even more dismayed after a series of corruption chargesresulted in the Greece police chief and other local law enforcement officers going to prison.

“This got me really thinking about the Holiday Inn case once again,” he said.

Mr. Niccoli said the tragedy of the fire had been compounded by the web of family ties and other relationships in Greece that seemingly connected everyone involved to everyone else, and had raised lingering questions about motives. He has called for a special prosecutor to take over the case.

“There has been enough corruption where it makes everything suspicious,” he said.

Returning from a stint as a fire-protection contractor in Iraq, Mr. Niccoli set up a Facebook page in 2010 with the goal of drawing attention to the case.

It worked.

Todd Baxter, a former Rochester police captain, had just taken over as Greece police chief. “It came to me in three boxes and it was a mess,” Mr. Baxter, who now runs a veterans group in Rochester, said of the case file. "I said, ‘Let’s close it, with or without an arrest — but let’s answer everyone’s questions.’ ”

Chief Baxter set up a task force to re-examine the evidence, bringing in investigators from the Monroe County district attorney’s office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Police and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Officially, the police have said only that Chief Phillips is a person of interest. But the investigation is focused solely on him, according to law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case remains open.

In 2013, the police executed a search warrant at the Ridge Road Fire District and combed through Chief Phillips’s computer and other documents, the officials said.

Much of the evidence that has been gathered in the case is circumstantial, the officials conceded, while saying that many convictions had been obtained with less.

In an interview, the current police chief, Patrick Phelan — whose own father was the Greece police chief in 1978 — refused to discuss Chief Phillips or the evidence in the case, but said he expected to complete the investigation soon.

“We feel we are close to finishing a prosecutable case that we would like to bring to the D.A.’s office with the hope they would bring it to a grand jury,” he said. “This is the most horrific crime we have ever experienced. It is the murder of 10 people, in one night, in one location. It is like a cloud that hangs over the town. It is there and unsolved, and everybody feels that.”

Mr. Niccoli said that the police had said before that they were close to wrapping up the case. This time, he said, he hopes that justice, at long last, is done.

“I remember asking myself,” he said, “if I had a family member die in this fire, would I want to know the truth?”