Between 1851 and 1853 a magician known as Irwin the Incendiary traveled the new state of California and the Oregon Territory performing his act. He delighted audiences with small displays of pyrotechnics. There was the lighting of a match on the opposite side of the stage, fireballs from his own hands, snapping firecrackers from seemingly nowhere. It was the sort of act that, developed thoughtfully, could have garnered real attention, earning him spots at theaters around the country. Instead, it had a carnival sideshow feel to it, all novelty but no substance. And indeed, Irwin was often on the carnival circuit. He also frequented mining and logging camps on holidays, when liquor flowed and he was free to practice another kind of magic after his shows—sleight of hand. Irwin was also a pickpocket. Between the commission from his shows and what he took on the side, he made a fine living. He had no grander ambitions.
Irwin was aided in his act by an assistant, Sweetheart Sheila. Sheila was young, barely out of her teens, and onstage it was her role to prance and gesture, to whip her long hair and smile her just slightly gap-toothed smile. She had freckles, which accentuated her youthfulness, and which the miners and loggers seemed to like, much to her chagrin.
“Sweetheart! The bowling pins!” Irwin would cry mid-show, and Sheila would arrange a half dozen pins for him to ignite one by one. This was the sort of thing the audience saw.
What they did not see: it was Sheila who made the flames.
Irwin met Sheila in the fall of 1850. She was standing on the bank of the Rogue River, setting fire to the tail feathers of passing ducks with only her fingertips. Irwin, who had been scratching out a career with card tricks and some clowning, saw an opportunity. Sheila, desperate to get away from her family and her childhood home, accepted an offer of work from him.
“What sort of magic will I do?” she asked.
“None,” Irwin said. “A woman can’t do magic. People will think she’s a witch. I’ll do the magic. You will help.”
Still, Sheila went along.
But after two years, she had grown tired of Irwin’s schtick.
The man was charming onstage, but a dullard and a bully once he was out of the spotlight. He treated Sheila less like an assistant and more like a bratty little sister he wished he could have left at home. She resented this. Also, though Sheila herself was no saint (as many a singed duck could attest), Irwin’s penchant for petty theft grated on her. Didn’t the men who came to their shows, seeking a rest after a long week of work, deserve to keep what they earned? Sheila sewed her own wages into secret pockets in her bedclothes to keep Irwin and his sticky fingers from taking them back.
She felt itchy, ill at ease, as she often had at home before she’d left with Irwin. But Irwin was not family and she owed him no grace.
“Tomorrow, how about I be the magician and you be the sweetheart?” Sheila asked Irwin one night after a show at a logging site outside Corvallis.
Irwin laughed. “Do you think they’ll drown you like the old witches back east? Or just run you out of camp with saws and hatchets?”
It should be noted that Irwin, like many men, was inclined to overlook obvious danger when doing so served his own worldview.
“I think people will like the show,” Sheila said.
“Don’t be dumb, girl.”
She nodded and Irwin assumed that was the end of it.
Just after midnight, Sheila crept from her own tent and went to Irwin’s, where she dragged her fingers across the canvas, tapping lightly at the wooden posts for good measure.
Security men from the logging camp and, later, the Corvallis sheriff, declared the fire an accident. Most likely, Irwin had fallen asleep smoking a cigarette. No mention was made of his assistant, whose own tent had disappeared during the night—not burned, just gone. It wasn’t until three nights later that a man who had been at the show sat up in bed, bolted from a deep and unrelated dream, to shout, “What’s become of Sweetheart? Is she okay?”
A frantic search was made and when no sign of the girl could be found, a diminutive grave marker was set for her at the camp’s edge next to Irwin’s. It gave the loggers some peace to know they had remembered her, had acknowledged her small, short life.
A decade later, Sheila was apprehended by law enforcement in Oakland, California. Not for what she had done to Irwin. No one had ever connected her to that event, and never would. Her arrest was instead for the immolation of two other men, at a hillside bunkhouse. It seemed she had been doing business with them for the past six months, and was involved romantically with one or the other, though jurors at her trial were never clear which, and Sheila, even under oath, would not say.
A deal gone sour? A lover scorned? A tale of abuse? Sheila’s lawyer begged her to give a reason, hoping he might plead for a light sentence if there was a sad story to go beside her innocent face. Sheila grinned. She leaned in and whispered, “I’ve burned nine men. Nine before these.”
After that, the lawyer made only minimal efforts on her behalf, though he never repeated to anyone what she had said. A smarter man than most, he feared her.