Given that so much of his life revolves around the South Platte and Cheesman Canyon, I wanted to hear from Dorsey himself just what's at stake with the recent natural disasters that have severely impacted the river.
they have never seen a fire burn this hot, this fast. reporter: how to slow it, let alone stop it was a massive challenge. evacuations. reporter: before it was over, 5,000 pled for their lives and above them dark and choked skies. it was a mushroom cloud, what i would imagine for a bomb. reporter: the heat was so fierce, the walls of flames so massive, exhausted firefighters could not surround this monster. there was just no way to fight it. there was just it wasn t doing anything, the water and fire retardant was evaporating. reporter: the stroch catastrophic inferno ranged untamed for 33 weeks. a staggering 137,000 acres transformed into a vast and charred dead zone. eventually, suspicions could tease their way out of the ashes. as it turned out, what really happened here was a mystery. and like any good mystery, it had clues, false leads, ties and
marshall and whistle blower was slapped with an irs audit after appearing in this documentary critical of the tsa. he says that audit was payback. a 360 exclusive tonight. and the black forest fire has sparked a criminal investigation, looking, authorities are, for evidence of arson. colorado has been down this path before. tonight, we revisit a stunning piece of detective work. how they culprit behind the heyman fire. allegations of forced captivity and abuse in ohio, this time in ashland, 60 miles southwest of cleveland. the victims are a disabled woman and her young daughter, held captive for more than two years as house slaves. at a news conference, authorities described what they endured. suffice it to say, these victims were exposed to subhuman living conditions, being denied meals, access to bathroom
head and the stem. there s the second one, the head and the stem. and there s the third one, the head and the stem. reporter: they theorized an arsonist struck the matches, purposefully lighting the dry grass in the campfire. but who? remember terry barton? she thought he might remember key details. bring her up there as a witness and have her reenact her actions on the day of the fire. her story is she smelled smoke. she drove up on the fire and saw it and parked her vehicle. and found the campfire burning at 20 x 20 feet. reporter: if you look there among the trees, you can see them timing barton s every step. and in their reconstruction, they stumbled across something they couldn t explain. the story just did not make sense within the fire behavior context. reporter: remember, barton said she was first drawn to the fire by it s smell, but experts on fire behavior said not possible. we asked the analyst for one,
tantalizing pieces of a puzzle and had an unlikely hero. i m so new and at the same point in time this was the biggest fire in colorado s history. reporter: special agent kim jones. i didn t think it was a crime. when i was going there the first day, i was told it was an escaped campfire. reporter: she was a rookie investigator but a former police detective, so moments after she arrived jones was certain this was no ordinary fire but a crime scene. forest service worker terry barton was on fire lookout in pike national forest when she spotted a fire. these first moments of the fire proved so critical that investigators asked barton to recreate them on tape. she first tried to smother the flames, then realized she needed backup, fast. the fire erupted and raged out of control. when investigators arrived, they photographed the campfire ring and searched for clues.