NBC News has reported that a former California Fire Chief is suspected of fatally stabbing his live-in girlfriend, a former escort, and is in hiding somewhere in the wilderness of Sacramento County.
According to sheriff investigators, 55-year-old Orville “Moe” Fleming allegedly “brutally and violently murdered” Sarah Douglas, 26, around Midnight on May 1 and then was helped by an accomplice to flee the scene. “We believe someone picked him up and took him somewhere,” said Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Sgt. Lisa Bowman. “We do not know who that is.” Fleming’s abandoned Cal FIRE truck was parked on a road in nearby Elk Grove, about 15 miles from the crime scene, where it was discovered by the Sheriff’s department later in the day.
Fleming met Douglas through an online website where Douglas advertised herself as an escort. Local media have focused on Sara Douglas’s past as a professional escort, and Fleming’s wife alleges that her husband and Douglas made sex tapes with other firefighters at the state academy where Fleming taught.
The Fresno television station KFSN reported Meagan Fleming’s claim that her husband and other firefighters had sex with prostitutes and that Moe Fleming owed Douglas money. Meagan alleges that Douglas threatened to release the tapes: “She said to me and my daughter and my son, ‘if your husband doesn’t pay, your husband is going to go to jail, and I have a sex tape of him being at the academy with firemen.’ I saw not only my husband but other men, I will not implicate their names, with prostitutes and firemen at the fire department.”
The former fire chief is a 24-year veteran of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and “an avid outdoorsman.” Bowman stated that Fleming’s keys were missing as well, which probably means that Fleming will have access to supplies and facilities to help sustain himself while in hiding. “Those keys open up miles and miles of trails and dirt roads that the public doesn’t have access to in some of the most rural parts of the state,” she said. “That includes food bins, lookout towers and live-in shacks.”
Bowman asserted that Fleming had a “decorated professional career… He knows right from wrong. He knows aspects of law enforcement… Knowing what he left behind, we have to assume that he’s in a dangerous state of mind that is unpredictable.”
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