Fire Lover (10 page)

And then he seemed to vanish from the San Joaquin Valley.

With all of this arson activity in three separate cities, the locals needed the resources of the Department of the Treasury's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. When Captain Casey returned to his office, he had his evidence packaged and sent to the laboratory operated by ATF in Walnut Creek, California, where it ultimately ended up in the hands of Special Agent Clive Barnum, a onetime NYPD cop, now an ATF agent with more than thirty years of experience as a fingerprint specialist.

Barnum was a descendant of Phineas T. Barnum, the legendary circus impresario, and was a well-known character in his own right. He tried processing the cigarette butt with a ninhydrin solution, and it brought out some ridge fragments of a fingerprint, but nothing identifiable. However, the ninhydrin processing of the partially burned yellow notebook paper produced a purple image that was eminently readable. When Barnum started charting points of identification on the fingerprint photo, he stopped counting at thirteen. The FBI was willing to go to trial with seven points of identification, and Barnum could see twice that many. This fingerprint would easily make a positive identification if they came up with a suspect. It was submitted to the state and national fingerprint databases, but drew a negative response. The owner of the print, whoever it was, had no criminal record.

Still, Marvin Casey had the fingerprint of someone who had set, or attempted to set, seven fires while moving south from Fresno to Tulare to Bakersfield, and such an arson series had never been seen in Central California before. Casey made a wry comment that maybe the fire setter was someone who just didn't like arson investigators, and the more he thought about it the more plausible it seemed. He started getting some strange but exciting ideas.

Casey made a call and got the conference roster of 242 names. He determined from their places of employment who would have driven home south from the conference, passing through each city where there had been a fire. Then he learned how many of those had traveled to the conference alone, because serial arsonists were solitary creatures. There were fifty-five.

And though he could have guessed at the response he'd get, he had to turn to the feds for help on something multi
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jurisdictional like this. He phoned the ATF office in Fresno and spoke with Special Agent Chuck Galyan, with whom he had worked on other arson fires.

Galyan was far more than skeptical, and later said, "Fifty-five names of respected arson investigators? I wasn't at all comfortable with this. I knew some of them. They were neat guys with lots of integrity. I certainly didn't think that Marv Casey's intuition was worth a wholesale inquiry into travel records and so forth."

Using the baseball imagery that the Mighty Casey's name invoked, Galyan said, "I thought Marv Casey was out in left field somewhere."

Everybody else with whom Casey spoke also implied that he should get over it. Maybe if there were just a few names. Maybe then he could go a little further with his notions. But Captain Marvin Casey could not get over the eerie feeling.

He thought it was at least plausible that the fire setter had been somehow associated with the conference, maybe in some civilian capacity, even though the arsonist understood which materials were very combustible and how to place a delay device. Or maybe the arsonist was an outsider who truly did hate arson investigators. Maybe someone was mocking them, playing all of those arson sleuths for saps and suckers.

Well, he had that someone's fingerprint successfully analyzed by Clive Barnum, whose ancestor P. T. Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute."

It remained to be seen who would be the sucker.

It had been nice working alone, but with John Orr's blessing, they had chosen another partner for him. At least this time the new cop would be the junior man. His name was Doug Staubs, an eight-year veteran of the Glendale Police Department. John thought it might work out. Staubs stood six foot three, weighed 220 pounds, and was ten years younger, so he could do any running and wrestling that needed to be done. He was as country as sweet potato pie, and was crazy about bowling alleys. Staubs called everyone "Buddy."

But it was the shortest of all his "marriages." By October, Doug Staubs was history. John insinuated that Staubs was worn out from working an off-duty job. Moreover, he said that Staubs had too much of the "typical cop persona." Staubs was thanked and bounced back to the police department with a diplomatic memo that said, "Returned to ranks due to manpower shortage."

In 1988, John was assigned a third partner, his hunting pal, Don Yeager. But John had plenty of doubts about what he described as Yeager's abrasive personality, calling him "Don Rickles without humor." At least Yeager was a firefighter instead of another Glendale police officer, but this made "a little resentment simmer at the cop shop," John said, especially since rumors had circulated that John had dumped the cop in order to make room for a firefighter.

John insisted that the working cops knew all about Staubs's off-duty commitments but had never revealed it to their superiors. "Apparently, the unthinkable had happened," John said; "a secret was being kept at the police department."

This was an allusion to what everyone who'd ever worked with cops knew to be true: they were the most gossip-obsessed blabbermouths on earth. If you wanted a rumor to circulate among every law
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enforcement agency and media outlet in the county by Thursday, tell one cop your "secret" on Monday. If you wanted it on the same-day news shows, tell two cops. They'd compete to disclose it.

John published another piece for American Fire Journal entitled "Profiles in Arson
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The Serial Firesetter." Between his writing and his organizing training sessions for other agencies, there weren't too many fire investigators in Southern California who hadn't heard of John Leonard Orr.

There was another important arson conference to be held, this time in the town of Pacific Grove, near Monterey. It was called the Symposium IV Arson Conference, a four-day affair scheduled to begin on March 5, 1989. As before, Glendale's senior arson investigator opted to go, and Don Yeager remained in Glendale.

The drive, though not much farther in miles than the trip to Fresno, was slower and more scenic: north through Santa Barbara with those ocean vistas, on to Santa Maria and the Sierra Madres, past the Los Padres National Forest and rolling hills dotted with California oak, into San Luis Obispo, and north on Highway 101 through the Coast Ranges and Salinas. It was John Steinbeck country all the way west to Monterey and the conference site, in the town of Pacific Grove, population fifteen thousand.

This was an ideal place for a conference, with spectacular scenery all along the Monterey Peninsula. Every golf enthusiast in the world had seen some of it on TV from Pebble Beach, and who wouldn't like to visit Carmel, where Dirty Harry himself, Clint Eastwood, was mayor? And just a short drive away, perhaps the most staggering vistas of all were at Big Sur. Of course, many of the conferees would arrive early and stay late for this one, taking advantage of the weekend before the sessions actually began.

On Friday, March 3, 1989, at 5:49 p. M., two and a half hours south in the lovely coastal town of Morro Bay, business was brisk at Cornet Variety Store when a clerk heard a woman yelling "Fire!"

The clerk grabbed a fire extinguisher, ran toward the screaming voice at the southwest corner of the store, and saw an incipient fire licking out from a pile of foam pillows in an aisle display. The blaze was extinguished quickly.

At 1:25 p. M., on Saturday afternoon, the day before the conference was to officially begin, and while people were still arriving, a second fire broke out, just nineteen miles away in the town of Salinas at the Woolworth's store, in the bedding stock where foam pillows were stored. The building was heavily charged with smoke and heat and experienced severe damage, but no one was injured. The fire was thought to be incendiary in nature.

The conference was a success, ending on the eighth of March. Most of the conferees checked out of their rooms that day.

The next morning, two hours south of the conference site, just off Highway 101 in the town of Atascadero, there began a startling spree. At 9:30 a. M., an employee at Pacific Home Improvement noticed a scorched roll of foam padding on one of the shelves. He pulled the padding from the box and found a cigarette with three matches attached by a rubber band, all of it wrapped in yellow notebook paper.

Almost two hours later, at the Atascadero branch of Cornet Variety Store, a fire erupted in the back of the building in the shelves that contained plastic bags full of shredded foam rubber. The sprinkler system activated and confined the fire until the arrival of an engine company.

Suspicious customers included a sandy
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haired couple in their twenties and an incredibly anal customer in his forties who insisted on paying for his merchandise even as the store was filling with smoke and flame and everybody else was hauling ass.

At 12:09 p. M., at Coast to Coast Hardware, a fire erupted in rolls of plastic sheeting and foam products, but was extinguished by employees using dry chemicals. There were no suspects worth reporting. All three fires had erupted on El Camino, near Highway 101, as though the fire setter had just been trucking along, going, "Eeney, meeny, miney . . ."

"Moe" occurred that evening at 7:55 p. M., twenty minutes south of Atascadero in the city of San Luis Obispo, at The Party Exchange and Et Cetera, a retail outlet selling gifts and decorations. The store manager, who was new on the job, was alerted by a customer to a column of smoke and flame behind the staircase. While ushering customers out and scrambling for a fire extinguisher, she was overcome by smoke and had to be helped to safety. The building was totally destroyed. Fire investigators believed that the blaze had been set in combustible packing material.

And then, after six fires in Morro Bay, Salinas, Atascadero, and San Luis Obispo, all in retail stores open for business, the spree ended. The weather station reported that it was cool, calm, and cloudy once again.

Captain Marvin Casey of the Bakersfield Fire Department was forty-five years old and had nearly twenty-two years on the job on the day he heard about the fires on the Central Coast that had broken out before, during, and after the Pacific Grove arson symposium. He was energized and adrenaline charged. It had happened again!

Casey once more quietly obtained a roster of symposium participants, but this time he could pare down a suspect list to only those from Southern California who had attended both the Fresno seminar two years before and this one. Instead of fifty
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five names, like last time, there were now only ten.

Marv Casey reported that his superiors scoffed. "I couldn't get anyone to believe me," he said, "because they didn't want to believe me."

The people on the list were respected arson investigators. One of them, John Leonard Orr from the Glendale Fire Department, Casey knew rather well. Two years earlier he had taken a class from John Orr in Glendale in order to get his state certification. Prior to the training session, Casey had heard about John Orr and was excited to meet him. He had hoped to mix and network at the Holiday Inn in Burbank where they gathered after class. Casey had found a group of fellow students in that bar, but John Orr was schmoozing a blonde that evening. Marv Casey figured correctly that he wasn't going to get any networking with his instructor that night.

While Casey had never been able to stir up enthusiasm for his idea, at least the Bakersfield fire marshal had given him permission to indulge himself in his spare time. So he once again phoned ATF Special Agent Chuck Galyan in Fresno, who agreed to submit the photo negative of Casey's latent fingerprint, along with the ten names Casey had culled from the rosters of both conferences, to the Department of Justice Regional Criminalistics Laboratory in Fresno.

After the fingerprint cards of the ten arson investigators were retrieved from the state database of people who hold public
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safety jobs, they were analyzed by a veteran Department of Justice fingerprint expert. His report, dated April 3, was sent to Galyan. It said that the usable impression appearing on the submitted photograph was compared with the inked fingerprints of the ten men in question. The results were negative. No match.

Casey thought that everyone could just have a good laugh at the hick from Bakersfield, a "city" they thought of as a sprawl of industrial parks, truck stops, and 7-Eleven stores, with a Kmart or two sprinkled in. They could chortle. This not-so-mighty Casey had finally struck out.

A month after returning from the arson symposium in Pacific Grove, the results of the exam for fire captain were announced by letter to contenders. John Orr's score on the exam was 98 percent. He had placed number one, and was appointed a fire captain on May 1. His pay jumped an extra six hundred dollars per month. With his daughter Carrie Lyn turning eighteen in June, her child support would end, so he'd realize a monthly boost of a thousand bucks. He immediately went out and bought a white Chevy Blazer.

Captain Orr wrote three "Profiles in Arson" for American Fire Journal that year, and toyed with the idea of trying a novel. But on his days off it was too tempting to just join his wife Wanda in the backyard hot tub, with their Siamese cat and their dog, Cody, lazing nearby. Life was good.