Before it crashed to the ground, the flames soared high and briefly illuminated the white steeple of the Fieldston Congregational Church, situated near the banks of the mighty Connecticut River in Southern Vermont. In founding the church in 1729, Joshua Abernathy had fled the congestion of New Haven and Boston and founded the village Fieldston. Abernathy had been the favorite student of Eli Yale, who gifted his personal Bible as a commencement honor. The "Abernathy Bible" had become a cherished possession which the church took extraordinary care to preserve. In the winter of 1978, an arsonist set fire to Fieldston's historic church and it burned to the ground, the Abernathy Bible with it. Townspeople asked each other who would do such a crime. There was the usual arrogance and hypocrisy among some of the church members, but nobody could understand a spiteful person who would carry out such a deed. Hank Richardson, an architect from Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a close friend of George Danbury, the new Fieldston minister. He was selected to design the new church, and he soon became an amateur sleuth because the Fieldston police were already understaffed and showed little interest in investing costly time and resources to catch the perpetrator.