On the plus side, maybe she could host one of those "extreme nanny" reality shows.
Don't tell mom, but the babysitter is a psychotic arsonist. Martha Dreher, 57, is a babysitter in Austin, TX. You would think that at 57, Dreher would have learned to put up with obnoxious kids by now, but either she's a crazy person (which she almost definitely is), or the two daughters of Glenn Williams were so awful that after a few months of working with them, they deserved to have their bedroom lit on fire.
The 90-year-old house is now being gutted because of the fire damage.
Earlier this month, Glenn Williams and his daughters were on vacation. While they were there, Williams told Austin's KVUE-TV, they got a call from Williams' son Adam, saying, "Dad, I just went to the kitchen—lots of smoke." The entire house didn't burn down because the fire was lit in the girls' bedroom and their door was closed, which caused the fire to eventually go out and only destroy the one room. In other words, this was just about those girls.
Dreher does openly say that she hated dealing with the girls and wanted to quit, and had told Mr. Williams on other occasions that his daughters, especially the oldest, were very 'disrespectful.' None of this proves that she started a fire in their room. The video surveillance footage of Dreher arriving at the home "to get popcorn" and leaving 20 minutes later while flames billow out of the girls' bedroom, however, tell a different story. As Williams told himself said, "they could have set the whole house on fire, and they actually closed the doors so the fire was maintained in those rooms and burned itself out. So it was definitely a vendetta against the two girls."
Defense attorney Amber Bode, who for some reason wants more evidence.
Not that that's stopping Dreher from claiming she didn't do it. Her attorney Amber Bode insists that, despite Dreher telling Mr. Williams all the reasons she had to hate his daughters, that Dreher had no reason to lash out at the girls. This is how Bode described her defense strategy for Dreher: "The thing that we are going to be pushing for—in addition to, obviously, lie detector tests and everything else we can do to prove her innocence—is evidence." Like a video tape of Dreher walking away from a burning building without looking back? Or would that be the wrong kind of evidence?
(by Johnny McNulty)