By Jane Prendergast and Jordan Gentile
The Cincinnati Enquirer

COLUMBUS - Police detectives will spend the weekend scrambling for more evidence in an effort to keep behind bars the man they arrested in a fire that killed five Ohio State University students, including two from Cincinnati.

Police insisted on Friday that Robert Lucky Patterson is the right suspect. They have until Monday to present evidence to Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O'Brien, whose office must present the case to a grand jury to keep Patterson jailed in the case.

Patterson, 20, was arrested last week and charged with aggravated murder and arson in the April 13 fire. The renewed police activity began after O'Brien reviewed a videotape of the police interview with Patterson and after he talked with witnesses in the case.

Police said last week that Patterson "made statements that implicated himself in the fire" during the taped interview, but they stopped short of saying he confessed. O'Brien said he approved the arrest after investigators told him Patterson admitted to the crime.

"Basically, we're back at work," said Sgt. Brent Mull, spokesman for the police department. "The prosecutor wanted more, and we're going to get it."

The police, fire department and FBI have been asked to forward all their files and evidence to the prosecutor's office, O'Brien said.

Mull said that investigators believe Patterson set the fire that killed the five college students, including Andrea Kali Dennis, 20, of Madeira and Kyle Raulin, 20, of West Chester Township. The fire also critically injured West Chester resident Josh Patterson, who is not related to the suspect.

In announcing the arrest of Patterson, police said they believed Patterson was involved in a fight or argument behind the house earlier that night and was spotted at the scene again around the time of the fire. Authorities said Patterson supported himself by stealing radios from college students' cars and that he was stealing radios the night of the fire.

Describing what this weekend would be like for detectives, Mull said: "Busy, busy, busy."

Patterson was ordered held without bond after he allegedly threatened some of the witnesses in the case.

State law requires that a suspect must be formally charged with a crime within 10 days of arrest. For that to happen, O'Brien would need to present the case to a grand jury Monday. O'Brien said Friday he would review evidence over the weekend, then determine whether to drop the police charges. Authorities have no other charges on which to hold Patterson, so he would be released from jail. Charges could be filed again.

O'Brien met privately Friday afternoon with family members of some of the victims. Dennis' parents were not there; they're out of town, said an uncle, Dan Burke.

"I just hope everything works out accordingly," Burke said. "The police have to do what they have to do. I know nothing right now."

Prosecutors brought the families up to date on the case during the meeting, said Dean Knisley, a lawyer representing Pam Wilson, whose daughter Christine died in the fire.

"They just kind of went over what's gone on. They pretty much ended the meeting saying they have not made a decision about going forward," Knisley said.

In addition to O'Brien's questioning of the police interviews, statements given by witnesses who tipped police to Patterson also have apparently come under greater scrutiny.

Kimberly Ferguson, who said she was the first to call the Crime Stoppers hot line about Patterson, worked with Patterson at a pizza shop near the Ohio State University campus. She said Friday that Patterson admitted setting the fire to her fiance.

Ferguson said she and four other tipsters talked to O'Brien on Wednesday. She said none of them saw anything the night of the fire April 13, but that they'd all heard Patterson, at various times, brag that he set the blaze.

"You don't joke about five murders," Ferguson said.

The two-story blond brick house on East 17th Avenue, which police said Patterson picked at random and where he set fire to a couch on the front porch, remained boarded up with plywood.

A homemade wooden cross in the front yard bears Dennis' name. And a flier, with pictures of all five victims, still hangs on a lamp post in the yard.

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The Associated Press and Kristina Goetz contributed to this story.