A 57-year-old Texas woman was apparently so angry at the way she was treated by two pre-teen girls she was babysitting that she set their house on fire when they went out of town.
According to ABC News, Martha Dreher of Austin was arrested this week and charged with arson.
Dreher had worked for the family for several months, said the girls' father Glenn Williams. The woman denies setting the fires, which were in the two girls' bedrooms. She did tell Williams, however, that she was unhappy with her job and wanted to quit.
"She said that it was horrible, that the girls -- my oldest -- had been very disrespectful," Williams told KVUE-TV in Austin.
Surveillance video from earlier this month showed Dreher driving up to the empty house and letting herself inside. She left 20 minutes later as flames began to appear at the girls' bedroom windows.
Adam Williams, the girls' brother, came home hours later to find the house filled with smoke. The fires were contained, however, in the two bedrooms and burned themselves out, but not before doing thousands of dollars' worth of damage.
"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," said Williams.
Dreher's attorney Amber Bode said Williams' accusations are unfounded.
"The thing that we are going to be pushing for -- in addition to, obviously, lie detector tests and everything else that we can do to prove her innocence -- is evidence," Bode told ABC.
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