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Keith Acree, a spokesman for the state Department of Correction, said the State Bureau of Investigation was looking into the incident, standard procedure.

The autopsy report was not complete last week, according to Chief Medical Examiner John Butts, but his office is investigating the death as an apparent suicide.

State prison officials, too, are examining their actions, Acree said, but their findings will become part of Bouleris' inmate files and not available for public scrutiny.

Such vacuums of information have vexed Kidder for years.

When Bouleris turned 19, she was considered an adult. Doctors could no longer share her mental health records without consent. Kidder and her ex-husband, as executors of Bouleris' estate, hope to soon gain access to their daughter's prison medical records.

"This might be the first time we get to understand what was going on with her," Kidder said.

A normal childhood

Nicole Jeanette Bouleris was born June 14, 1978, in upstate New York.

"She was an absolutely normal, wonderful girl," Kidder recalled.

She made A's and B's in school.

She was on Raleigh swim and soccer teams.

Then the turbulent teenage years came on. She sneaked away to Florida with a boyfriend in a stolen car. She made an attempt on her life that landed her in a private care facility.

With medications and intensive care, Bouleris graduated from Sanderson High School in Raleigh and completed a year at East Carolina University in Greenville.

But her parents' marriage was crumbling then. Bouleris was abusing alcohol and drugs. She dropped out of ECU and returned home.

First she lived with her mom until Kidder's insistence on a curfew drove her away.

"She kept losing jobs because she was staying out late and not getting up in the mornings," Kidder said.

Then she tried staying with her dad. Eventually, the parents paid the first two months' rent for an apartment that Bouleris was unable to keep.

A pattern developed. She would get a job, lose it and face homelessness.

Kidder bought a condominium and charged her daughter $300 in monthly rent. She wanted to help but also wanted Bouleris to stand on her own.

Bouleris paid only one month's rent before losing her job. About a half-year later, with no rent coming in, Kidder told her daughter she had to move.

It was shortly after that, on Feb. 28, 2001, that Bouleris set fire to an unoccupied townhouse at Gaston Wood Court. The fire spread, displacing one family and causing more than $300,000 in damage.

E-mail confession

Bouleris already had a police record by that time. In the arson case, according to court files, Bouleris fled the scene but used a friend's computer to send e-mail to Raleigh firefighters and police confessing to setting the blaze.

When investigators caught up with her, according to court records, she said she was being followed by the FBI and CIA and had not sent the e-mail. "She told police she wanted to get out of this dimension and into another dimension which she called home," the Wake County court file says.

But a search of her book bag revealed kindling, candles, lighters and a fire starter log.

Bouleris was admitted involuntarily to Dorothea Dix Hospital, a state mental health institution, on March 26, 2001. She escaped nearly a month later on April 24, according to court records, and was taken back into custody on Aug. 24, 2001. She turned herself in to police to report being sexually assaulted by a serial rapist she later helped convict.

"Ms. Bouleris reports that secret voices told her to set the fires," the court documents say. "She stated she had not taken her medication for a while and was hearing voices."

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