Here is a video from 1978, in which Virginia Gratto, now Virginia Utigard, is interviewed the morning after her husband and seven children were killed in a house fire in Cohoes, NY. An unemotional-seeming Utigard says that she fled the fire and couldn’t get back into the house. Strangely, she adds that she would have liked to save the 4-month-old twins, but makes no mention of her other five children. The fire was ruled an arson, but the case was closed years ago without an arrest.
Utigard’s escape from the burning home has long been viewed with suspicion, said retired Albany County District Attorney Sol Greenberg. Six weeks after the blaze, she moved across the country and married an apple farmer.
Whether or not she had anything to do with the fire, as detectives believe, it’s hard to imagine a mother who doesn’t go into the burning home in which her children are sleeping. The case has been reopened, and last week, detectives questioned Utigard again.
