On 17 April’12 DC Dawson arrived at our rented house and, to my amazement, arrested me for Arson.

I agreed to be interviewed and was told how Jorgensen had shown that I had caused the fire whilst I was 400Km away. I realised that my arrest was IAG NZ’s reaction to the High Court case our lawyer Andrew Hooker had filed. IAG NZ had only a few days left at the date I was arrested to file a defence and I knew that I had no connection with starting the fire so evidence claiming to show I had committed arson must all have been fabricated.

Supposedly, Jorgensen could show I had the items needed to make this work and he had found hacking software tools on the recovered hard drive from the PC. Together with Joseph, he had recreated the system and it worked, showing that was how it had been done and a video had been made showing the recreation.

It was the most stupid thing I had ever heard! Looking back I should have smiled and said nothing but I thought that if I explained that it was totally impossible I would be released.

I explained to Dawson that I only had simple ink jet printers, my Trade Me, NZ’s Ebay equivalent, purchase record would show that for the last five years I had been buying ink jet cartridges proving this was the case. I explained that ink jet printers had little computing power and no programmable memory that could be hacked and since they had no heat source whatsoever, getting one to burst into flames would be impossible. Suggesting that was the method of ignition was not supportable.

Dawson continued, then left me alone in the interview room for around 40 minutes whilst he consulted his colleagues. I expected to be released but when he returned he continued the interview. After the interview I was formally charged, Dawson told me I would appear in Hamilton District Court the next day and be bailed. He gave me three box folders of the evidence that he had referred to in the interview, the Disclosure. I would have to hand it in at Hamilton Police Station where I would spend the night in custody and collect it after the hearing the next day.

As Dawson had explained I was bailed, after my wife arrived to collect me we went to Police station to collect the disclosure, it had been LOST whilst in the Police Station! I protested, they searched again finding nothing. I asked to see a senior officer who eventually gave me a slim folder of Disclosure, the Fire Service and Police image DVD’s and some useless paperwork. The Reports of the investigators and the DVD of the Police Interview were not included.

After a day or two recovering I emailed Andrew Hooker telling him what had happened.

I also tried to discover if anybody else had heard of hacked printers causing fire, posting details of my arrest on several printer forums.

I discovered that Columbia University had released a press release on 29 November ’11 about HP printers having an issue with this and that it got lots of coverage in the scientific papers. It didn’t take long to find those reports.

That made sense, it was clearly the source for the madcap remote ignition system and the timing fitted perfectly. The investigators had returned to the fire scene on 12 December’11 just days after this report was published and until then they had no way to connect me to the fire from 400Km away.

IAG NZ’s paid legal assassin, lawyer Chris Hlavac wrote to Andrew Hooker, declining our claims on 3 May, the important paragraphs are shown, full letter downloads.

This outlines, a very different Remote Ignition system, no mention of hacking here and the printer operates to TRIGGER an ignition device, it isn’t itself the cause of the fire.

It took until late May for the Disclosure to start to trickle in, the investigators reports were in one of the later batches.

I was being FRAMED!

All the reports, that Dawson had referred to at the interview, had been edited, there was now no mention of hacking in any of them. Now we had an even more stupid edition of the ‘Remote Ignition theory’. This time the printer pulled a string attached to another switch that completed a battery powered circuit that caused an ignition device to heat up and cause the fire!

This was utterly ridiculous, the printer needed a mains power connection so why did you need a battery powered ignition switch? Why not do without all of this and just plug a simple time switch into the power point used by the printer and turn on a heater covered with inflammable material? Far more reliable and probably would have left nothing out of the ordinary to find after the fire?

The only reason this Trigger system was suggested was to get around my evidence at the Police interview and leave me as the arsonist!

The evidence was all altered to match this new Trigger based Remote Ignition theory, EVERYTHING had been altered even the Police Interview had been edited! The problem there is that they couldn’t make all the ends match up.

Dawson had referred to several pages and paragraphs of the Computer Forensics Report by Martin Jorgensen in the interview, these pages and paragraphs did not exist at all in the new reports. A more glaring issue is that the ONLY Computer Forensics Report was dated 15 May ’12 which was a month AFTER the interview and that report didn’t have the referred pages and paragraphs or the picture of the three hard disk drives on the cover!

So what report was Dawson referring to in the video?

All the reports had been BACKDATED, none of the reports referred to at the interview were disclosed. IAG NZ had attempted to wiped out the hacking remote ignition system from the legal history of the case. They would have succeeded BUT they were unaware that I had emailed Andrew Hooker and posted on the printer forums just days after the interview showing the hacking theory had been the reason for my arrest!

The new evidence just appeared out of thin air, as indeed had the previous Hacking set but the new evidence was created not to match any existing facts, there were none! It had been CREATED 100% to get around the awkward issues that I had revealed at the interview. HP had confirmed days after the original article was published, that the fire threat only could work with Laser printers not ink jets and that even then HP lasers had a thermal cut out to prevent one ever catching fire but it appears Jorgensen only read the early articles to get his idea.

In most countries, FRAMING a person by altering evidence and then swearing it is true under oath is a serious offence leading to jail sentences but in New Zealand, IAG NZ do not care.

In 2013, we had a Pre Trial hearing to test the admissibility of the investigators evidence. It was eventually, 2 days in April and 1 in August. Joseph had been forced to disclose the 500+ images he had taken at the fire scene and many of these showed much of the evidence in his reports and testimony was Perjury. The Judge, however, believed everything he said, had he testified that the sky was pink and that he could fly I think the Judge wouldn’t have blinked.

The result was that all the investigators evidence and the video of the recreation was deemed admissible. Naturally we appealed.

IAG NZ like their parent company IAG in Australia operate a system to increase profits at the expense of the policyholders.

This system, DELAY, DENY, DEFEND was being used against us. Every delay possible was maximised, IAG NZ’s delaying tactics worked well, in 2014 we were made bankrupt, we had lost everything in the fire, home, contents, and our business so we had no way to pay back the mortgage.

We fought the bankruptcy, we would be easily able to clear our debts when IAG paid the insurance claims but this argument was rejected because the Judge stated that there was irrefutable evidence that I had caused the fire and so IAG had every right to decline the claims! IAG NZ had made submissions to the Court full of the false evidence created by their investigators.

On the 17 June 2014, the result of the Appeal was received, it was a rare victory for us and common sense!

The evidence of the investigators was not admissible on the evidence to date, they were, however, given the opportunity to rectify the glaring hole in the case, the absence of any proof of a Print Command. The Crown relied on a Print Command being sent from the Macbook in Hamilton to the PC at Killara and onto the printer claimed to have been found in the library.

Both editions of the Remote Ignition device relied on the printer operating, attempting to print a document. To do so required the PC to send a ‘Print Command’ to the printer and to date none had been found. Since the whole thing was theoretical and mythical that wasn’t surprising. One couldn’t just be created on the hard drive in their usual style since the defence had been correctly sent a certified copy of the recovered Hard Drive from my PC at Killara. The Court of Appeal had set the Crown an impossible task but it gave IAG NZ the opportunity for much more delay!

A three day hearing took place on 16-18 February ’15 to finally sort out the admissibility issue. This time though the defence had a real computer expert sitting in the courtroom with his full PC analysis system plugged into the defence copy of the PC drive recovered from the PC at the fire scene, unlike Jorgensen he actually knew what he was doing.

The expert produced a document from the hard drive print spooler that showed that the last PRINT Command issued by the PC had been just after 11pm on the 8 September’11.

The print spooler is a queue of Print Commands issued to the printer, each print job is held in the queue waiting for it’s turn when the printer has finished all previous jobs in the queue. The last job printed was 24 hours PRIOR to the fire, Jorgensen had no option but to agree that the document proved this was the case.

However, Jorgensen couldn’t just give up. He pointed out that there was a way to use a printer without using the print spooler or needing a print command. The rarely used ‘Direct Printing’ method, this enables a user to set up a PC as a teletype or fax machine instantly printing text as it is received. To set this mode up required a parameter in the PC Registry to be changed from 0x00000000 to 0x00000002 but Jorgensen and the defence expert couldn’t find any authority or reference as to which of the Printer Parameters was the correct one.

Jorgensen was granted permission to return to Wellington to research the issue and report back to the Court the next day by AVS link.

The next day on AVS, he appeared elated, he claimed he had found the parameter, called ‘attributes’ and it was set to 0x00000002. He produced a document, an excerpt from one of the printers computer registry pages.
It is shown below:-

Jorgensen was claiming that the attributes value had been changed to 0x00000002 at some point after the spooler processed the last Print Command on 8 September. This supposedly showed that the printer was under direct print control by the PC at the time the printer triggered the fire. At first glance this looked critical to our case but I knew I had never used Direct Print mode.

The defence expert decided that he would check the original registry page that was where Jorgensen’s extract came from, it is shown below.

It is the same page ‘Drivers\Version-3\Brother MFC-J265W Printer’ and the contents of the large red box are the same as the block of data in the extract including the 0x00000002 Attributes value.

However, this particular page of the Registry was ‘last written on 30/04/2011 at 3:38:35UTC’ as seen in the small red box, not when the system registry was last modified on 9/09/11 at 11.04pm which was the last time that ANY of the pages in the Registry was changed.

Jorgensen was shown to have introduced FALSIFIED evidence to the Court but far more significantly, his attempt had uncovered solid evidence that I had NO OPPORTUNITY to cause the fire.

• The last ‘Print command’ had been issued on 8 September using the print spooler.
• The printer registry page for the printer had not had any changes since 30 April’11.
• The print spooler was, therefore, in charge of the printer on the night of the fire.
• No ‘print command’ had been added as a job to the spooler since 8 September, 24 hours prior to the fire.
• The Remote ignition theories all relied on the printer operating on 9 September, which required a ‘Print Command.’ late on 9 September.
• With no ‘Print Command’ on the day of the fire the Remote ignition theory is DEAD.

The two computer files together indisputably prove there was NO PRINT command issued at all on the day of the fire and that the print spooler was in charge of the printer which would have needed a Print Command to be activated.

All the versions of the Remote Ignition device relied upon the printer being activated by a Print Command but the last print command was 24 hours prior to the fire.

The Forensic Toolkit would have made this perfectly clear to Jorgensen who had produced the excerpt using the time and date of the last change to the PC Registry not the date of the last change to the Printer Registry page.

The excerpt was a deliberately misleading document intended to incriminate me further, it is Perjury or worse but the Judge took no action against Jorgensen.

Being 400Km away from the fire scene there was no opportunity for me to start the fire when Remote Ignition is ruled out and Joseph had stated at the pre trial:-

Joseph had found no evidence to connect me to setting the fire in the debris of fire scene, he left that to Jorgensen’s evidence. Jorgensen’s evidence, that Remote Ignition caused the fire had been shown never to have happened at all!

Everything was FICTIONAL! There was never any evidence that I was involved in any way with causing the fire!

Further, the evidence that NO Print Command ever happened on the day of the fire is all based on computer records from the PC hard drive, it would stand as proof both in the Criminal Court and in the Civil Court – the files prove Remote Ignition did not take place.

The Crown Barrister, Mr Annandale, accepted that this was the position at the end of the hearing as recorded by Judge McDonald in his Oral Judgement,

On 1 May’15, I was ACQUITTED of the Arson and associated charges.

What IAG NZ did next, which is even more SHOCKING is covered on the Acquitted page.

If you want to get more details of the actions taken by IAG NZ then see the full Case Study HERE!