Fire Lover (13 page)

John reported that it was after dropping off the child that he heard the crackle of activity on his radio frequencies. Then, he said, he saw brownish smoke rising in the sky and he thought it would be something to videotape for his training films, so he sped to the fire scene. During the fire suppression, he stood across the street from the building videotaping the efforts of the firefighters, wondering, he said, if the high-voltage lines overhead would melt and drop onto the sidewalk.

John was surprised when his partner, Joe Lopez, who knew he was in Burbank on private business, showed up at the three
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alarm blaze and found him videotaping. John said of Lopez, "He was taking this joined-at-the-hip stuff rather seriously." The senior arson investigator had never been anybody's Siamese twin. This Siegfried-and-Roy stuff had to stop.

Captain Steve Patterson, an arson investigator from the Burbank Fire Department, arrived at Mort's Surplus while the fire was still burning, when the roof was sagging and it was unsafe to enter. Captain Patterson could not find any remnant of a delay device, but wrote in his report that he believed one could have been used because no one was seen in the area of origin just prior to the fire.

The next afternoon at 1:00 p. M., on Laurel Canyon Boulevard in North Hollywood, Constance Schipper, manager of the paint and plumbing department of Builder's Emporium, was stunned to see fire billowing up from a shopping cart filled with throw pillows. She ran to the cart and began pulling out the flaming pillows; the fire was extinguished by other employees. There on the floor among the pillows were a cigarette butt, two matches, and a rubber band.

Hollywood was next. On Monday, December 17, at 1:43 p. M., J. J. Newberry's, on Hollywood Boulevard, sustained moderate fire damage and heavy smoke damage after a fire broke out in display racks packed with blankets and comforters. Arson investigators listed the fire as being "suspicious in nature."

On the biggest shopping day of the year, December 26, Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley was struck by an incendiary blitzkrieg so brazen that retail establishments soon started hiring security guards for fire watch.

The first was at 11:43 a. M. on Ventura Boulevard, at a dry-goods outlet, Bed Bath & Beyond, in a rack of plastic-wrapped throw pillows. The overhead sprinklers were triggered and the fire was contained very quickly. But just four blocks away at Pier 1 Imports, also on Ventura Boulevard, and at Strouds Linen Warehouse, fires broke out almost simultaneously at 12:07 p. M.

The fire at Pier 1 Imports came shooting out from under the mezzanine, and the ten customers in the store started yelling and running for the exits. The fire burned through the roof and ventilated itself. At Strouds Linen Warehouse, the cashier working at the rear of the store spotted smoke and flames bursting from a display of comforters. The heat got so violent that the metal beams holding up the roof became distorted and pulled away from the wall, causing the roof to cave in, which fed more fuel to the blaze.

A team of arson investigators from the L. A. Fire Department interviewed thirteen people before hearing of a suspect of any kind, but then they encountered a pair of security officers from the Thrifty Drug Store a few doors away from Strouds. The guards described a medium-size white male, thirty-five to thirty-nine years old, with slick black hair, wearing a purple shirt, black pants, and a black jacket. He was said to have had "soot" on him when spotted just prior to the fire at Strouds.

The description of the sooty suspect was broadcast on the LAPD frequency to all units in the vicinity. The arson team then interviewed the owner of a nearby newsstand, and again the description of the man in black popped up. This time he was described as a "fast-walking mumbler."

Later that day they contacted still another employee of Thrifty Drug Store, who said that just before the fire, the same man in black had walked into Thrifty's and made an announcement to one and all. He'd shouted, "There's a guy out there that was looking in Strouds' window! The guy was so ugly that he caught the window on fire!"

The next day, at 9:00 a. M., the arson team got a call they'd been wanting. A witness had spotted the man in black. He was in a restaurant men's room on Ventura Boulevard near the fire scene. The investigators immediately called LAPD asking that a police unit get to the location and detain the guy.

Thirty minutes later the arson team arrived at the restaurant, where a pair of LAPD officers were holding the man in black. The arson team instantly noted a strong odor of smoke coming from his clothing, and while the cops watched the suspect, the arson guys went into the restaurant men's room where they detected a stronger smell of smoke. In the toilet bowl they saw charred toilet paper. And there was a puzzling discovery. On the floor and in the sink were short pieces of hair. The hairs were all over the place, as if the man in black had been shedding. It was weird, they said.

"I was pulling my gray hairs out," he informed them. "Don't you pull your gray hairs out? And I went into Thrifty's yesterday to sample the aftershave and deodorant."

When they asked why his clothes smelled of smoke, he said, "Because I was burning newspapers in that old abandoned hotel down on Ventura."

That stopped them. Burning newspapers? For what?

"To keep warm," he said. "There's no heat in an abandoned hotel, you know. And there's no lights. No room service either."

And because lots of fires are set by fruit loops, the man in black was booked at North Hollywood Division Jail on a charge of 451(c) of the penal code, "arson of an uninhabited structure."

For a time he was truly thought to be a spree fire setter, and he did not return to his abandoned hotel where there was absolutely no room service.

Before the year ended, the fire setter had demonstrated that retail establishments open for business were not safe on weekends either. He struck twice within an hour on Sunday, December 30.

The first attack occurred at National Store on North Broadway, not far from Dodger Stadium, a store that catered to many residents of nearby Chinatown. The mezzanine sustained heavy fire and smoke damage from burning pillows and polyfoam.

Forty-nine minutes later, a few miles away on Sunset Boulevard, at Crystal Promotions, a fire erupted in the rear of the store in a display of plastic decorative products. Once again, the LAFD arrived fast enough to save the structure.

When Desert Storm was launched, in January 1991, the workload increased for the Glendale Arson/Explosives Unit because of terrorist paranoia. Any abandoned briefcase, shopping bag, or unwanted postal package could prompt a call to the investigators. Other than that, it was a fairly uneventful month
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except for the arson team almost blowing themselves up.

They had decided to burn off a pound of homemade fireworks at their training center, and assumed that the flash powder would burn, as usual, with a bright, smoky flash. It didn't. The blast was heard two miles away at fire department headquarters and knocked off part of the roof of the blast room. Captain Orr decided that his impulsive personality was not suited for the methodical defusing and disarming of explosives.

Meanwhile, his first attempt at fiction writing was moving forward. On weekend mornings he began writing at 8:00 a. M. and would sometimes produce twelve pages a day. He chose the title Points of Origin because of its obvious importance in arson terminology, but also because he felt that it had significance for the two main characters, Aaron Stiles, a firefighter turned serial arsonist, and Phil Langtree, an arson investigator who is committed to hunting down the fire setter. He said that he'd originally wanted to present the two characters as similar men from similar backgrounds who had gone diverse ways only because of "psychological triggers" in Aaron's life, but that the character of Phil Langtree was so strong and tenacious, he took the story away from the author and turned the novel into a manhunt/thriller. The moment of moral divergence was originally to have been their "points of origin."

Within a year, readers of that novel wished that those "triggers" had been explored by the novelist for what they may have revealed.

On March 3, once again on a Sunday, the southern districts of Los Angeles came under attack. The first fire, at 1:32 p. M., occurred at Thrifty Drug Store in the Wilmington area. There were more than one hundred customers milling around, and people charged the exits. Employees saw a fire column three feet in diameter boil out from between two stacks of pillows and then instantly mushroom across the ceiling.

Arson investigators were still arriving at the raging inferno when they received word that another Thrifty Drug Store, in nearby San Pedro, had been attacked at 2:09 p. M. The sprinkler heads above the fire had activated and extinguished a blaze that had begun in a stack of pillows.

Two weeks after fires in the south, arsons occurred back up in North Hollywood. There were two on Tuesday, March 19. The first broke out at the Goodwill store on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, where employees spotted mattresses burning but got them outside before much damage was done.

Twenty-one minutes later, at the House of Fabrics on Victory Boulevard, employees and customers managed to extinguish a small blaze in a display of foam
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rubber pads and other synthetic products used in the construction of pillows.

Another Pier 1 Imports store, this one on Hollywood Boulevard, was the next target, on Friday of the same week. The fire erupted at 1:02 p. M. in pine shelving stacked with pillows.

John Orr no longer used his Chevrolet Blazer as an on-duty car. He sold it after being given a white five-year-old Ford Crown Victoria on which the police department had logged 110,000 miles. It was a take-home car, and gas and maintenance were provided, but John spent five hundred dollars of his own money to add a few custom touches, such as a siren speaker, which, he said, put out the decibel level of "a low-flying F-16."

Joe Lopez asked John if he could take off on a weekday to join a bunch of firefighters on a day trip to Big Bear Lake for some skiing. His senior partner granted the request, and on the very day that Joe Lopez left town, the most terrifying arson series yet struck Los Angeles County in the communities of Lawndale, Redondo Beach, and Inglewood: five fires occurred within a two
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and-a-half-hour period on March 27, 1991.

At 1:40 on that Wednesday morning, business was relatively light at D&M Yardage on Hawthorne Boulevard in Lawndale. Employee Linda Zito saw a man, whom she later described as a white male of medium size with brown hair, roaming around the store. She approached and asked if she could help him and he asked if they carried camouflage material. When she said that they did not, he smiled and kept browsing. He left, and twenty minutes later the fire came: a column of flame appeared only eighteen inches from the floor. But in an instant it was spiraling up, all the way up to the ceiling, and she realized that the foam-backed display draperies were on fire.

Engine Company 21 had no chance. A cascade of flame blasted out of the doors and windows and heaved up, devouring the roof. The entire building was destroyed.

Less than two miles away, at 12:10 p. M., a customer at Stats Floral Supply was walking past a display of Styrofoam products and spotted a piece of yellow lined paper that was smoldering. She picked the paper out of the display and ran to the front of the store where an employee dumped a cup of water on the paper. Inside of the note paper was a cigarette butt, and three paper matches attached by a rubber band, just like the one recovered in Bakersfield by Captain Marvin Casey more than three years earlier.

Half a mile from Stats Floral Supply, and twenty minutes after that arson attempt, a fire erupted at Thrifty Drug Store on Aviation Boulevard in a display of foam patio cushions. The automatic sprinklers discharged and several employees kept the flames in check until the first engine company arrived and suppressed it.

At 1:28 p. M. in nearby Inglewood, at the J. J. Newberry store, a fire broke out in a pillow display. It was extinguished by employees, with only light smoke damage done to the premises.

And finally, on that afternoon of fire, again in the city of Inglewood, at the Pic N Save store, a customer began yelling, and employees extinguished a fire in a box full of stacked pillows.

The arsonist had had a very busy day, but had only succeeded in setting the one spectacular blaze that gutted D&M Yardage, leaving just the four walls, putting several employees out of work, and closing down the business for two years.

Chapter
6

Special Agent Michael Matassa of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms received a vibrating page that Wednesday afternoon. He had the audible page turned off because he was sitting in trial in Los Angeles Superior Court, assisting the district attorney's office with an arson fraud that involved over a hundred witnesses. Matassa was the acting resident agent in charge until the boss of the Los Angeles office returned from sick leave.

Deputy District Attorney Michael Cabral was prosecuting the owner of a furniture store on a charge of torching his own property for insurance, thus triggering the assistance of ATF with what otherwise would have been an L. A. Fire Department investigation. Mike Matassa liked working with Cabral and other deputy D. A.'s on arson cases, because the U. S. Attorney's Office was notoriously hard to persuade when it came to filing criminal cases, and arson was among the most difficult of crimes to prove. State prosecutors were more apt to file the case and try to make it work without obsessing over a remote possibility of an acquittal.