1255 words (5 minute read)

"20/20" Interview with Gail Beveridge: Airdate April 6, 1989

Gail: After the first month or so, the excitement—and the intimidation—of teaching language to a chimp began to wear off, and we started to notice…other things.

 

Interviewer:  Such as?

 

Gail: Lots of…mishaps.  Things disappeared and then turned up in weird places, or were never seen again

 

Pause.

 

Gail (cont.): There were lots of fires.  At first, we figured, “Well, this is an old house,” and blamed the accidents on bad wiring.  Nothing was ever seriously damaged, but it was spooky. You could be working in a room and all of a sudden, you’d smell smoke and when you turned around—fire!  They usually started in the corners, low to the ground.  We seldom found any cause.

 

Interviewer: Were they near electrical outlets?

 

Gail: It might start near an outlet.  It might start with a pile of notepapers that you left on the floor, or it might start on the carpet in the middle of an empty room.  I remember one day when Tammy and I were trying to bake cookies with Smithy.  They were a gesture of good will for our neighbors at Herbert Terrace.  Smithy had gotten out of the house and caused some havoc over there, so we wanted to sweeten them up.  Wanda suggested Tammy take them cookies because she was friendly with Mrs. Belancourt.  It was partly my fault Smithy got out, so we were all three of us doing the baking.  I measured, Smithy put in the ingredients, and Tammy signed with him about the procedure while Jeff filmed us...

 

Cut to Archival film footage of Tammy and Gail standing in the kitchen. 

 

Smithy sits on the counter near the sink beside a mixing bowl, watching as Tammy opens the oven door.  Gail holds a tray of cookies and leans forward to put them inside.  Smithy claps his hands over his eyes and an instant later, a jet of flame shoots out of the oven. 

 

Gail (V.O.) I was so scared.  If I had been one second faster with that tray, my face would have been burned off!

 

In the film, Gail screams and jumps back, dropping the tray.  She covers her face. At the same time, Tammy leaps back and kicks the oven door closed.  She pulls Gail backward and they huddle beside the sink.  Jeff runs into view of the camera with a fire extinguisher.  Tammy waves an oven mitt at him.  Jeff grabs it and jerks the oven door open with one hand while spraying the extinguisher at the now-roaring flames.  While Tammy and Jeff consult each other about the fire, Gail turns to Smithy and signs “OK?” to him.  Smithy looks around the kitchen with a downcast, anxious face.  He covers his eyes again and Gail hugs him.

 

Cut back to interview. Gail sits upright in her chair as she watches the footage play.

 

Gail: There! Did you see what he just did?

 

Interviewer: That’s the second time he made that sign.  Let’s back that up again.

 

Gail: That’s his sign for “dark.”

 

Cut to slow-motion replay of the film just before the fire erupts.  Smithy covers his eyes and the flame blasts out of the oven.

 

Gail (cont.): There!  He did that just before the fire…I can’t believe I never noticed that before.  I always thought he was covering his eyes so he wouldn’t see me burned, but he covered them first.  Oh, my god!

 

She laughs nervously

 

Interviewer: What caused that fire?

 

Gail: We couldn’t find out.  Jeff examined the oven and we even called in a repairman to check it out.  We kept Smithy in his room so the guy wouldn’t freak out.  He thought it might be a faulty gas line, but couldn’t find anything for sure.  He said the oven looked good for its age.  He tried to sell us a new appliance, and Tammy and I pushed for one, but Wanda and Piers said we couldn’t afford it.  I refused to use the oven after that, but we didn’t ever have any more problems with it.

 

Cut to montage of still photos:  Scorch marks on a wall about one foot above the floor, spreading one foot up and 18” out across a corner and onto the adjacent wall; a tape measure shows the width of the damage. Scorch marks on a tile floor approximately 8” wide; the claw foot of a bath tub is visible in the upper right corner of the photo.  Image of Ruby standing in the dining room, holding back a curtain and pointing to a round scorch mark, approximately 5” in diameter, in the center of the wall; the carved angel faces are visible above her and a chair is half-visible in the right side of the frame in front of her.

 

Interviewer (VO): Was Smithy always present during the fires?

 

Gail (VO): Sometimes. I remember one fire started in the library when Smithy was playing on the floor.That time, Ruby checked the windows because she thought the sun could have burned its way through, like with a magnifying glass. She even went outside and looked for something that could have reflected light, like a mirror or some of Jeff’s camera equipment.She didn’t find a thing.

Every other night that summer, at all hours, the alarms would go off and we’d jump out of bed and run around the house trying to find where the fire was this time so we could keep it from spreading.  Luckily, if we did find a blaze, it was somewhere easy to spot, like the kitchen or the library.  We were always thankful it wasn’t in the closed-off wing. Of course, lots of times we never found anything—no smoke and no fire—so we’d write it off as a faulty alarm and creep back to bed hoping we wouldn’t burn alive because of someplace we’d overlooked.

 

Now at the same time the fires were popping up, we had another problem: Smithy kept breaking out of his room.  No matter what we did, he’d find a way out, either by getting the door to his room open, or by managing to get out the windows.  The top windows!  The ones that were within his reach had bars to keep him inside, but somehow he managed to get above them up to the windows that were almost twelve feet high and locked.  Nothing we did could hold him.  So, because he kept sneaking out when we weren’t looking, or when we were asleep, and because some of these fires started at night…

 

Interviewer: …you thought he was setting them?

 

Gail:  Well, I always had my doubts.  It was scary to think our little furry child might be trying to burn the house down around us, but at least it was an explanation.  I don’t believe it was the right one, but it was still better to try to believe in something that sounded…realistic.

 

Interviewer:  Did you suspect Smithy of the first incident you witnessed?

 

Gail: I couldn’t explain it …


Next Chapter: Excerpt of letter from Gail Ehrlich to Vanessa Ehrlich, dated August 8, 1974: