Apparently in the last fire, just before he was caught, he got his car struck. His behavior attracted attention of a hiker. He was observed and filmed by this c

Apparently in the last fire, just before he was caught, he got his car struck. His behavior attracted attention of a hiker. He was observed and filmed by this concerned citizen who contacted authorities. That filming including getting his picture plus the license plate on his car. That cinched enough to know his identity and suspicion. Once he became a suspect to the level, a court order to get phone records would be easy. The moment your phone is on, it is constantly keeping a full data handshake and connection to any base station nearby and to phone company switching computers. You are constantly "under surveillance" in a geographic sense if you have a cell phone turned on (with or without a valid SIM card - the phones serial number gets logged even if an account isn't validated). Having it this way is the only way an in-coming call could ever be routed to you! Remember phone switches are all Unix based and they have log files constantly filling just like any desktop system. Literally just "grep" the files. The most amusing experience related to this I ever had was being able to talk to my uncle who was blue-collar AT&T technician. But he knew his Unix.