When a rental property in Dargaville caught fire for the second time in one day, the insurance company blamed the landlord. She tells Investigations Editor Alex Spence she has been wrongly accused but can’t afford to go to court to clear her name.
On a Monday morning in November 2019, on a quiet street in Dargaville, a woman looks outside and sees thick smoke rising from a house next door. Within minutes, two engines arrive from the town’s volunteer fire brigade. The woman phones the property’s owner. “Are you sitting down?” she says.
The owner of the house, Robyn Roff, is a 73-year-old retired singing teacher who lives in Maungaturoto. Roff is active in her Anglican parish and the local chapter of Grey Power. She volunteers for a community group that serves free lunch to seniors on the first Wednesday of every month.
The house is one of three investment properties Roff owns, along with two apartments in central Auckland. It is a modest single-level dwelling down a right of way, with three bedrooms, a carport, deck, ranch slider, and corrugated iron roof. Roff rents it to an elderly woman for $320 a week, which she uses to cover the repayments on a small mortgage. The house is insured by NZI, part of the giant Australian-owned IAG group.
Roff hangs up and calls her husband, Trevor, a farmer, who lives about 20 minutes away. (They are separated but not divorced.) Trevor picks her up and they drive the 50 minutes to Dargaville, where they go first to the fire station to find out what happened.
The senior fire officer fills them in: One of the tenant’s grandchildren went out and left a pot of oil unattended on the stove. The pot caught fire and flames spread up the kitchen wall and penetrated the ceiling.
Roff and Trevor drive to the house, where the tenant is waiting.
With a couple of neighbours, they enter the house through the ranch slider. Trevor takes photographs. Inside, the house is a blackened mess. The damage to the kitchen and living area is extensive. The wall behind the stove has almost completely burnt away. Sections of the ceiling are gone. Shreds of insulation hang from the ceiling battens. Cupboards and appliances are charred. There is debris strewn across the floor.
Roff, who says she gets stressed easily, recalls being shocked by the sight. “It’s not every day a tenant burns your house down,” she says. “I’ve never had a fire before.” After that, she recalls, “I don’t think I was thinking very logically.”
Roff and Trevor remain in Dargaville for the next several hours, going back and forth to the property. In the days and weeks to come, they will struggle to give a clear explanation of their precise movements on this afternoon, which will become the source of enormous contention between investigators and lawyers.
At a neighbour’s suggestion, they go to the local high school where students have constructed a relocatable house. Roff thinks it could be an inexpensive temporary solution if the insurance company decides the house is a loss, but when they measure the site they realise the unit is too big to fit. Regardless, they drive to the district council office to check whether there are any regulations against putting a relocatable unit on the property. While they’re in town, Roff withdraws $100 from an ATM.
At around 4pm, according to their account, they return to the property for the final time that day. Roff says she goes back now because it occurs to her that firefighters took sheets of iron off the roof earlier, and she is worried about the house being left exposed to the weather. Trevor is annoyed — he doesn’t see the point — but he agrees to drive back again to appease his wife. He stays in the car, parked on the street, while Roff walks down the driveway to the house.
In Roff’s recollection, she walks around the back of the residence to get a ladder she keeps in the crawlspace underneath, but she can’t open the access door. She notices a couple of open windows and pushes them shut. She doesn’t go back in the house. As she walks back down the driveway to where Trevor is waiting, Roff sees the tenant coming down the street. They meet at the letterbox at the end of the driveway. The tenant asks Roff what she was doing. While they’re talking, they notice smoke rising from the back of the residence.
The house is on fire again.
Roff fumbles for the number that the fire chief gave her earlier. The tenant phones 111.
Dargaville fire station gets the alert at 4.21pm. Within six minutes, a truck with the callsign DARG621 arrives at the property for the second time that day. By this time, a bedroom at the rear of the house is engulfed in flames.
Roff, Trevor, and the tenant watch from a safe distance as the firefighters extinguish the fire. At 4.55pm, the fire crew advises the regional command centre at Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Fenz) that the situation is under control. The firefighters wait at the scene for police and a specialist fire investigator to arrive. It is logged as “K12″ — a suspicious fire.
That evening, a Fenz fire investigator arrives from Whangarei just as the firefighters are finishing “salvage operations”.
The investigator has been with Fenz since 1996, serving for two decades as a firefighter before training as a specialist investigator a few years ago. His job is to analyse the locations and circumstances of major fires to determine their origin and cause. He was called to the scene because the senior officer at the scene couldn’t immediately tell why the second fire started. Police have also been notified. (A spokesperson for police confirmed that an investigation was carried out at the address, but no criminal charges have been brought. “The matter [was] filed pending any further lines of inquiry.”)
The investigator enters the house through a door by the carport.
He notes the damage from the first fire in the morning — severe burning concentrated in the kitchen — and agrees with the firefighters’ assessment that it was started by a pot left on the stove. Looking at the burn patterns, he notes that the flames appear to have travelled away from the kitchen, diagonally across the living room, and stopped outside a bedroom in the northwest corner of the house.
Now he turns to the second fire.
He finds “severe fire damage” in the corner bedroom. The ceiling is gone, the panels either burnt away or pulled down by firefighters. The window has blown out. Bedding and clothing is piled up in the centre of the room between two single beds, which he says appears to have been damaged by burning material dropping down from the ceiling.
Examining the burn patterns, he notes that the damage appears to be worse in the ceiling and upper part of the room than at floor level. “The underside of the ceiling battens were not burnt, suggesting the fire was mainly above the ceiling,” he will later write in his official report. Above the doorway, some of the roofing timber has been burnt completely. “This indicates the fire burnt hotter in this area then moved west across the room,” he observes.
Based on this, he concludes that the second fire originated in the ceiling space above the bedroom doorway.
As for the cause, the investigator considers the possibility that it was an accidental “reignition” — that embers from the first fire were left smouldering in the roof and spontaneously caught fire again several hours later. While the firefighters in the morning used a heat-sensing camera to detect any “hot spots” in the ceiling after the first fire and found nothing, “that is not to say one may have been missed given the point of origin of this fire”.
According to Roff, this is also the view of the fire chief. She recalls him telling her and the tenant after the fire investigator completed his examination that it was probably a spark in the ceiling and “that we were in the clear”. (The fire chief says he can’t recall what he said to Roff that day. The tenant did not respond to a request for comment.)
But the Fenz investigator decides there’s not enough evidence to ascertain how the fire started and so he leaves this open when he files his formal report a few weeks later, classifying the cause officially as “undetermined”.
There is something else he notes in his report.
“The unusual actions of the landlord give rise to speculation,” he writes.
According to his report, the tenant told him in an interview that when she returned to the house and found Roff standing in the driveway, there was “conflict” about Roff’s “unauthorised entry to the dwelling and her lack of action on discovering the fire”.
Roff disputes that there was an argument with the tenant or that she went back into the property. She says the investigator didn’t speak to her to get her version of events, even though she was at the property the entire time he was there. In his report, the Fenz officer says Roff “was unavailable when I wished to talk with her”.
“Insurance investigators are pursuing this avenue,” Fenz’s official report says.
Two weeks later, a pair of investigators for IAG turn up at Roff’s home in Maungaturoto. Roff is irritated they haven’t called to warn her they were coming. “I was about to go down to a computer course and I was going to have lunch,” she tells them – but she invites them inside anyway, and agrees to be interviewed.
One of the investigators is employed directly by IAG, the other is a private investigator. The private investigator has already interviewed Roff at length, a few days after the fire. Since then, he has sought to retrace Roff’s movements that day, examining phone and bank records and CCTV footage from retail premises in Dargaville and interviewing witnesses.
IAG has also hired its own specialist fire investigator to examine the scene and determine how the second fire started. Together, this team of investigators has arrived at a starkly different conclusion to the Fenz official.
“It did not start in the roof,” one of the investigators tells Roff, according to a transcript of the interview.
Fenz’s investigator “didn’t know what he was talking about”, he says. “We had an expert go in there and have a look. This guy is a cause and origin expert. He stands up in court and gives expert evidence. He told us exactly where the fire started in that bottom bedroom.”
While Fenz’s investigator thought the fire started in the ceiling above the bedroom, the private investigator tells Roff that IAG’s fire expert believes it started at floor level and was deliberately lit. (IAG declined to provide a copy of its fire expert’s assessment because it is legally privileged. Fenz told the Herald its investigation was comprehensive, carried out to its usual standards, reviewed at a national level, and that it stands by its findings.)
“Our expert has told us this and in his view this is arson,” the first investigator says.
“No,” Roff says.
“It is.”
“No.”
“This is what he’s told us.”
“No.”
“Why do you say no?” the second investigator interrupts. “How do you know it wasn’t arson when he does?”
“I’m saying no because the point is I don’t actually believe it,” Roff says. “I don’t believe it.”
The interview lasts for more than an hour and a half, and the investigators drill down hard on Roff’s description of what she and Trevor did on the day of the fire and apparent inconsistencies in their recollections.
Why did they look at a replacement unit when the house wasn’t written off?
Why did they return to the property when they had no legitimate reason to?
Did they buy petrol?
Did Roff go back into the house and lock the doors just before smoke was seen rising from the roof?
Gradually, the investigators reveal that they believe Roff deliberately lit the second fire to inflate the value of her insurance claim.
The fire expert’s view is one piece of evidence that has led them to this conclusion. But they’ve also, they tell her, uncovered other things to confirm their suspicions. CCTV footage from premises in Dargaville. A witness statement from the tenant saying she saw Roff exiting the house just before smoke started from the roof. Roff and Trevor’s untruthful statements about where they were that afternoon.
“The things are adding up,” the first investigator says.
At one point in the interview, the second investigator tells Roff: “Despite what you say now, there’s no doubt the second fire was definitely arson. I know you say you don’t believe that, but . . . ”
“No, I don’t,” Roff says.
“But it’s beyond doubt it was arson. So let’s just say it’s arson, which it is.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Who would you think would have had a motive to come back in the house the second time and burn the house down?”
“I have no idea.”
“Did you see anybody else around?”
“Pardon?”
“When you were at the back of the house was there anyone else there? Anyone run away from the house or anything like that?”
“All I feel is there was either a spark,” Roff says, “there was either some sort of . . . ”
“Forget what you feel,” the second investigator other cuts her off. “An expert who has been doing this for 20-odd years was saying it’s definitely arson. It’s not a case of how you feel, you just accept the fact that it was arson.”
“Well, I don’t actually believe it.”
“Well, why won’t you believe it? I don’t understand that.”
“No, I don’t believe it in my own mind,” Roff says. “That’s something that — because it’s certainly not me.”
“Well, forget about what you’re thinking now,” the private investigator adds, “and just accept that it is arson.”
“I’m not going to accept it.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not going to accept it. I’m not accepting that it’s arson.”
They go around in circles, the investigators insisting that the evidence points to her, Roff insisting that it was an accident.
“Did you definitely not light the fire?” the second investigator says. “Because you’ve not said that to us.”
“I didn’t light the fire,” Roff says. “I didn’t light the fire. This is my house. Why the hell would I want to light a fire for the second time?”
In April 2020, Roff gets a letter from NZI denying her claim. The insurer accepts that the first fire was accidental, but has determined that the second fire was deliberately lit. “Of particular concern,” the letter says, “are statements made by you — and Trevor Roff on your behalf — to our investigators, which give inconsistent explanations of your actions and whereabouts on the day of the fires and leading up to and including your discovery inside the house at the time of the second fire.
“Our investigations have revealed that, in breach of your policy obligations, the statements made by you and on your behalf have not been truthful. Further, our investigations have revealed that on the balance of probabilities you are the person responsible for deliberately setting the second fire.”
The insurers allege there is “no plausible accidental cause of the second fire” and that Roff had the opportunity, means, and motive.
“In light of the above, the only conclusion that can be reached is that you started the second fire in an attempt to increase the amount payable to you in respect of the damage caused by the accidental kitchen fire,” the letter says. “Accordingly, your claim in respect of the damage to the property has been deemed dishonest and fraudulent and must be declined.”
Under the terms of Roff’s policy, NZI has the right to declare her insurance void if it believes a claim is dishonest. On this ground, it refuses to cover even the damage that it accepts was caused accidentally.
Now it’s two-and-a-half years later — a cloudy, muggy Wednesday in November. Roff has agreed to meet the Herald in Dargaville to show us the fire damage. The house is still a wreck. The windows are boarded over. The interior, stripped of the tenant’s soot-damaged furniture and belongings, is a charred shell. The two fires caused so much damage that the house was uninhabitable. A chartered surveyor estimated it would cost $218,000 to repair the house or $318,000 to rebuild it, and Roff says she can’t afford to do either without the insurance money, so it remains in a dilapidated state – a drain on her finances instead of providing the rental income she had hoped would support her in retirement.
On this morning Roff is accompanied by a forensic fire expert named Marnix Kelderman. In the darkened living area, Kelderman points to where the ceiling used to be, recreating for us the journey he believes the flames took after the first fire, explaining why he is convinced the insurance company’s investigators are mistaken about the origin and cause of the second fire.
In the 1990s, Kelderman was a forensic scientist at the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and the Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR), the government testing and research agency. For more than two decades, he has run his own consultancy specialising in examining crime and fire scenes. After the insurance company denied her claim, Roff hired him to prove that she wasn’t responsible.
Kelderman reviewed the Fenz report, photographs taken on the day, transcripts of Roff’s interviews with the insurance company’s investigators, and then conducted his own investigation, combing through the burned-out house, analysing the burn patterns, and recreating minute-by-minute Roff’s movements that day — and came to the conclusion that there was a simple and innocent explanation for the second fire.
Kelderman says the Fenz investigator was right that the second fire started in the roof above the bedroom doorway, and says the fire evidence points to an accidental cause.
“There was significant evidence to support the contention that the second fire which occurred approximately 5½ hours after the first fire was caused by a reignition event from the first fire,” Kelderman wrote in a summary of his findings that he shared with the Herald. “The fire started in the roof cavity, in an area above the wall near the doorway to bedroom 1. The re-ignition event could have been caused by smouldering hot product; such as smouldering building paper, or smouldering embers, timber, dried vegetation, or debris. The smouldering area of the house must have been unfortunately missed by the fire service after the first fire.”
In Kelderman’s view, the fire travelled in the ceiling space from the kitchen across the living room to the corner bedroom. Firefighters stopped the first fire just outside the bedroom but didn’t fully extinguish it. Although they used a heat-sensing camera to detect hot spots in the ceiling, Kelderman says it would’ve been hard to detect one in that area without removing the ceiling panels, which they didn’t do. (Asked if it was possible they missed a hotspot, the senior officer who attended the fire told the Herald, “It’s quite possible.”)
Kelderman walks into the corner bedroom, pointing out the space in the roof above the doorway where he and the Fenz investigator believe the fire started. As Kelderman describes it, the charring patterns on the timber framing, walls, furniture and carpet are consistent with a fire that started in the roof and dropped down, not the other way around.
The timber in the roof was “clearly more fire damaged from the topside down”, Kelderman wrote in his report, while many of the ceiling battens were not charred underneath, as he says they would be if the fire was rising. The damage in the lower part of the bedroom, he says, is less severe than he would expect if the fire started at floor level. What burning there was around the base of the beds could’ve been caused by a foam mattress melting and dripping down.
Kelderman says he’s seen no factual or scientific evidence to support the assertion that Roff started the fire deliberately to fraudulently increase the value of an insurance claim. He says he hasn’t even seen an explanation from the insurance company of how they think Roff started the fire. There were no traces of an accelerant found at the scene. She wasn’t seen buying or carrying anything that could ignite a fire.
Kelderman says he was confused by Roff’s and Trevor’s accounts when he read the transcripts of the insurance company’s interviews, but that they made sense when he got them to walk him step by step through their memories of that day.
He says the allegedly dishonest inconsistencies, contradictions and omissions in Roff’s version of events down to her being stressed after the fire and muddled by the line of questioning. “This is a bit stressful, this is why I’m getting a bit confused,” Roff told the investigators in one interview.
“Reignition could have occurred at any time when circumstances and conditions for a flaming fire were met,” Kelderman wrote in his report. In his view, it was an unfortunate coincidence that Roff happened to be at the property when it went up in the flames for the second time.
It may have been Roff closing windows from the outside, changing the airflow in the ceiling, that prompted the second fire to ignite at that moment, Kelderman believes, “or the fire was going to randomly start at that time anyway”.
Roff looks around at what is left of her rental property. “It’s been harrowing,” she says. After NZI denied her claim, Roff hired lawyers who pushed back against the allegations that she deliberately started the fire and made a fraudulent claim. Still, the insurance company stuck to its position.
When you’re locked in a disagreement with an insurance company, Roff says, it is not an evenly-matched fight. She can’t take a complaint to the Insurance & Financial Services Ombudsman because it doesn’t have the authority to investigate claims worth more than $200,000. She could take the company to court, but her lawyer reckons it could cost about $300,000 if she loses and Roff says she doesn’t have the money.
The fire and its aftermath have been financially ruinous, Roff says. She lost three years of rental income. She reckons that clearing the house and securing it from the weather and squatters left her more than $1000 out of pocket. There are monthly payments on a mortgage of about $37,000. And the professional fees to her lawyers and Kelderman.
“There are people I owe money to,” she says. “Bills I can’t pay.”
Roff says she may have no option now but to put the property up for sale. That might give her enough money to repay what is left on her mortgages and the fees she owes her advisers. It’s far from the financial security she hoped would carry her through her retirement.
Roff says the company’s decision to decline her claim has also made her effectively uninsurable.
Insurers pool information about claims in a national register maintained by the Insurance Council of New Zealand, which means any provider that Roff approaches to take out a policy in future will see that she has had a claim denied for dishonesty.
“This is not insured,” she says of the property around her. “My own house is not insured. I’m on a blacklist.”
And without insurance, she will also struggle to get a loan or mortgage again.
Roff says the dispute has also had a heavy toll on her mentally. It has caused ongoing stress, affected her sleep, and caused her to lose weight.
She says it was devastating to have her integrity and honesty challenged so directly. “It’s not a nice thing to find out that you’ve been accused of lighting a fire when you’ve always tried to be a good landlord,” she says.
Roff has received professional counselling. She goes to the gym several times a week to keep her spirits up. She has sought comfort in her Christian faith.
“I guess because I have an inner strength, I’ve been able to handle things,” she says. But she is determined to clear her name. “I would not like to see another person go through this, particularly an older person.”
In a statement to the Herald, IAG says it engaged “experienced, independent fire investigators” as it does for all significant fire-related claims. It said it does not base its decisions on Fenz investigations, particularly when they classify the cause as undetermined, and doesn’t decline claims unless it has “expert opinions, based on clear evidence”.
The company says it asked to see Kelderman’s report but Roff’s lawyers declined to provide it. IAG says it proposed a confidential exchange of experts’ reports, but this overture was ignored. “It is in her hands how she wants to progress this matter,” a spokesperson says.
“IAG’s assessment team remain available and will review any new evidence that Mrs Roff is willing to supply,” the spokesperson says. “We are more than happy to reconsider Mrs Roff’s claim if other evidence is supplied.”
“IAG takes these matters very seriously,” the company adds. “The claim was considered in a very thorough process and IAG remains confident in the correctness of its claim decision.”
Roff’s barrister says he turned down the company’s request to exchange expert reports because of the lack of progress in discussions to that point, and because of the legal terms the company insisted upon. He says Roff is keen for that discussion to take place if it’s “open and transparent” and the company is willing to enter a mediation process.
“I’d just like the insurance company to re-look at it,” Roff says. “Three years down the line is far too much. I’m now 76. And it is actually taking a toll. And it’s gone on for too long. So we need to have a conversation to resolve it.”
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