City of Towering Infernos

Las Vegas suffers yet another tragic high-rise conflagration

By his own first account, Philip Bruce Cline, 23, a busboy at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel, was a hero. He was working his way down from the 29th floor in the east wing of the 2,783-room hotel, the nation's largest, picking up room service food trays from hallways. When he reached the eighth floor, he saw flames "flickering on the wall" in the elevator lobby. He tried to fight the blaze, then ran down the hall banging on doors to alert guests. But the fire raged out of control for more than an hour, killing eight people and sending 200 to hospitals.

Las Vegas Police Sergeant Robert Hilliard was not impressed by Cline's story. Checking the charred upper floors in the 30-story building after the fire was put out, he found trays and dishes still in the halls. A small point, perhaps, but, concluded Hilliard, "Cline wasn't doing his job, or he wasn't telling the truth." Cline was questioned again and given a lie-detector test. Said Police Lieut. John Connor: "He failed miserably." Finally, Cline signed a statement admitting to a far more sordid story: he had been engaged in a homosexual act on a sofa in the eighth-floor elevator lobby when his marijuana cigarette accidentally ignited window draperies. He knew his partner only as "Joe."

Unconvinced that the fire started all that accidentally, police charged Cline with arson and eight homicides. If convicted, he could be sentenced to death.

The son of a retired Air Force master sergeant, Cline had dropped out of high school in Sunnymead, Calif. He was placed in a home for juvenile delinquents when, his father said, "I was overseas, and the wife couldn't handle him." Cline was under psychiatric care in California from 1973 to 1975, then began to drift across the U.S. He worked for a time as a busboy at the MGM Grand Hotel but is not thought to have set the fire there that killed 84 people last Nov. 21. Since the MGM blaze, Las Vegas has had two other hotel fires--at the Royal Americana in December and the Dunes in January --that are believed to have been deliberately set. Two fires, one in December and one in January, were quickly extinguished in the El Cortez hotel, where Cline had worked briefly. He had been dismissed after being charged with the theft of $747.50 from a casino change bank.

According to officials, there were three other fires at the Hilton in addition to the one that Cline admits having started. After the main fire was under control, others broke out in quick succession in a second-floor linen closet, a third-floor service elevator lobby and in a ninth-floor fire hose, which had been cut open, stuffed with paper and ignited. Cline has been charged with setting only the eighth-floor fire but is being quizzed about the others.

The eighth-floor flames had billowed out of a large window and roared skyward, cracking glass in the upper floors and setting rooms there afire. Helicopters lifted more than 100 people off the roof.

Others were less fortunate. Jack Turinsky, 41, of Anchorage, apparently had rushed into the 24th-floor hall, was overcome by fumes, struggled back to his nearly smokeless room and died there. Bruce Glenn, 47, of Plymouth, Minn., smashed open his 16th-floor window, dangled briefly from a sheet, then fell to his death on a third-floor deck. Harry Gaines, 69, and his wife Lorraine, 67, of Los Angeles, heeded the usual survival advice. They fled into their tenth-floor bathroom, shut the door, crammed wet towels under it and stuffed other towels into the air vents.

But the flames were too fierce. Both died.

Said Fire Captain Ralph Dinsman:

"Sometimes you can do the right things, and it doesn't work out." -

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