Fire Lover (21 page)

The interview lasted an hour. The last thing Cornelison said to the arrestee was, "After we get our case together will you talk to us?"

John Orr answered, "I won't close the door on it. But you could have come and talked to me instead of embarrassing me in front of my neighbors."

The prisoner was taken downtown to federal court, where he met with a federal defender who informed the prisoner that the U. S. Attorney's Office had recommended no bail. At 5:00 p. M. he was transported a short distance away to the Metropolitan Detention Center, where he was told he would remain until the preliminary hearing and bail review, both set for December 18.

John eventually ended up in an eight-by
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eight-foot isolation cell with a stainless
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steel toilet, a sink, and a table with a swing-out seat. There were three ragged novels there which he read in the next two days. He couldn't eat and only drank milk.

When he called Wanda she told him that the task force had searched the house, garage, and her mother's studio behind the garage. "They were gentlemen," she said, and they'd even played with Domino.

The Orrs' conversation was broken by long silences, and he finally asked her to contact a Glendale attorney, Jack Dirakjian.

Just about everyone who worked with the task force had an opinion on the interrogation of John Orr, which pretty much mirrored that of the arrestee: that it was inadequate. The task-force critics seemed to think that they should have tried addressing his allegiance to the fire-fighting service.

ATF serial-arson profilers had briefed the task force on suggested interrogation techniques and later also voiced dismay with the results of this interview. But all of these critics had been quick to diagnose John Leonard Orr as a classic sociopath, a term that criminologists as well as cops use synonymously with the more precise psychopath. To most criminologists a sociopath is produced by his environment, but a psychopath's emergence depends on a number of factors, including genetic predisposition, as well as biological or psychological factors. The term psychopath is more disturbing, less certain, and probably more accurate in most cases.

But if John Leonard Orr was a classic psychopath
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that is, a man with a giant ego and a dwarfed superego; a conscienceless, manipulative, deceptive creature with shallow emotions who cannot truly give or receive love; an impulsive thrill seeker who is glib and grandiose, who cannot empathize or feel responsibility for his criminal behavior
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then how could any interrogation have worked? He could never have felt the burden of guilt or empathy or brotherhood that they wished to extract from him in the interview room. A psychopath would not confess in such a situation unless faced with a cattle prod and branding iron. It seemed that the critics were faulting the interrogators for not playing upon the conscience of a man who, by their own definition, didn't have one.

The search of John Orr's office that day, in the presence of his shocked and dismayed partner, Joe Lopez, revealed more items of possible value to the task force, including videos and photographs of fires, and something that settled the long debate as to whether John had bought the story from the San Luis Obispo cop about the tracking device being a bogus bomb.

In the arson unit's office they found, clipped together in his desk, photos that he'd taken of the tracking device that day, the business card of ATF Agent Howard Sanders, who had delivered the Pillow Pyro flyer to his office, a Post-it note bearing ATF frequency numbers, and the ATF megahertz rating. Along with ATF's property ID number for the tracking device was the name of a Glendale electronics store where John had obviously collected the information he'd needed.

At the end of the day, an orange folder inside John Orr's canvas bag was found to contain other prints of the tracking device, so it had to have been a matter of great concern to him. The optimists had been wrong. He had known all along that he was the object of an ATF investigation, yet he'd never come forward to make an inquiry. And that would be very hard for him to explain from the witness stand.

The "gentlemen" searchers at the home of Wanda Orr had found two drafts of Points of Origin, one of them consisting only of the first three chapters, up to . An item of no particular importance to the task force or the U. S. Attorney's Office, but nevertheless interesting, was found in his briefcase that day
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a badge.

It was a special sort of badge whose "fire department" banner could be popped off, and a banner saying "police" could be snapped onto the shield in its place. The task force believed he must have been posing as a Glendale police detective.

John Orr later wrote that he sometimes used a tactic of posing as a burglary detective so as not to alert arson suspects when he was questioning witnesses. His chronicles tell of the tactic, and the badge:

It was used on those few occasions when I truly needed it. The last thing I ever wanted to be was a "real" cop. My loyalties were with the fire service; law enforcement was a sideline.

But many who knew him said that he was forever a cop wanna-be, and the badge was validation of their opinions.

The day after the arrest of John Orr was indeed a busy one for the entire task force as well as for Assistant U. S. Attorneys Stefan Stein and Walter Brown, who'd been consulting with the task force since early summer.

Of greater interest to the lawyers than anything found in the searches of John Orr's car, home, and office were copies of letters that he'd kept with the manuscript of his novel. One of the letters was designed for any potential publisher or agent in order to explain something about the story accompanying it. This one was sent on April 17, 1991, to the L. Harry Lee Literary Agency:

"Common" criminals seem to have one characteristic they all share, the need to distance themselves from their crimes as quickly as possible, all criminals, that is, except the arsonist. The arsonists stay close by, and sometimes even participate in the discovery and eventual extinguishment of "their" fires. Bizarre? Indeed it is. With the criminal so close at hand why is it that the crime of arson has the lowest arrest and conviction rate of all? The reason is simple. The arsonist is weak and insecure, and usually perpetrates his crime in the dark, generally in seclusion. Sometimes he uses time delays. Additionally, the evidence is almost always destroyed, if not by the fire, then by the firefighters during extinguishment. Arsonists are not greed motivated like the "common" criminal.

I have been a professional firefighter for over twenty years with the last ten devoted to full-time arson investigation for a fire department in the Los Angeles area. With the clearance of over 400 cases I have found that the true pyromaniac is responsible for only five percent of all fires, but generally causes the most destruction and sets the most dangerous types of fires.

My novel, POINTS OF ORIGIN, is a fact-based work that follows the pattern of an actual arsonist who has been setting serial fires in California over the past eight years. He has not been identified or apprehended, and probably will not be in the near future. As in the real case, the arsonist in my novel is a firefighter.

The second letter found in the search of the Orr residence was dated July 28, 1991, was addressed to the Writer's Digest Criticism Service, and had been sent with a check for three hundred dollars. Again there were certain passages of great interest to the task force.

My completed manuscript (started in 5/90, finished in 4/91) is my first attempt at fiction, after writing a series of articles for a fire service magazine, AMERICAN FIRE JOURNAL. I am a firefighter, an arson investigator, actually, with 21 years of fire service. POINTS is the story of a serial arsonist and the investigator who tracks him in Southern California. Aaron, the arsonist, is actually a firefighter, and Phil Langtree slowly develops the theory that the suspect is somehow related to the fire department.

My arsonist is sexually/psychologically motivated, and POINTS is somewhat fact-based. There is an arsonist plying his trade in the west, and he sets the same types of fires portrayed in my novel. The investigation is continuing . . .

There was a letter addressed to Natasha Kern Literary Agency, Inc., the postscript of which caught the attention of the task force:

My novel is fiction, but is based on a real arsonist who has again hit the L. A. area earlier this year doing over $12 million in damage. The investigation now has federal assistance and could be linked to fires outside California. It is my feeling that the arsonist could be a firefighter, but I'm not directly linked to the investigation and can't confirm this fact.

The most interesting letter the task force found was one addressed to the Dominick Abel Literary Agency, dated June 3, 1991.

My work is a fact-based novel of an ongoing investigation here on the west coast. A serial arsonist is setting fires throughout the west and is quite possibly a firefighter. The series has been going on for over five years and I was even considered a suspect at one point. In early May of this year, I found a radio tracking device attached to my car in San Luis Obispo while I attended a training conference. Ironically, my protagonist experiences the same situation. I had already written the chapter dealing with the protagonist being tailed before I found that I was being followed. By the way, I'm not the arsonist and the investigation out here continues. My work is fictional.

In that the Pillow Pyro Task Force hadn't even known about the series of fires in the Central Valley in 1987, and on the Central Coast in 1989, the letters to the agents and publishers were among the most damaging evidence they'd found. John Orr's novel was depicting some events he shouldn't have known about, and he'd indicated that they were arsons committed by a firefighter, when only a few people in Central California knew about Marvin Casey's theory.

As if anyone needed any more convincing, John Orr had not believed for one moment the bomb hoax story, and knew "he was even considered a suspect at one point" of a federal investigation. And yet he had never come forward to ask any questions, to comment or to deny, as his fictional arson investigator had logically done in Points of Origin. The assistant U. S. attorneys believed that the letters might ultimately prove more of a problem for the defendant to explain than the novel itself.

One of the people Mike Matassa had phoned first was Mike Cabral, the deputy district attorney whom he had been assisting in court back in March when the extraordinary fire series had struck Redondo Beach, Inglewood, and Lawndale. When the fingerprint match had come back on April 17, Matassa felt bad that he couldn't explain to Cabral what they were doing and why he had to partly abandon Cabral's case.

He'd said then to the prosecutor, "It's something I can't share, Mike. But when it happens, you'll know it. Sorry."

When he explained it all to Cabral on December 5, the prosecutor said, "I knew it was big, and I understand why you couldn't tell me about it. It's okay."

After prosecutor Mike Cabral hung up the phone that day he couldn't have known that in the years to come, this case was going to consume a larger portion of his life than Matassa's.

On December 6, John Orr received a visit from his Glendale lawyer acquaintance, Jack Dirakjian, who handled mostly civil cases and decided that John would be better served by his associate, Douglas McCann, who handled criminal matters. John wrote of that meeting:

I hated McCann instantly, but it was obvious that Jack wanted Doug to represent me ... I listened to the staccato presentation of McCann outlining defense strategy. Only thirty-two years old, he cut off his superior and me, choosing to take total control of our brief interview. He was arrogant, opinionated, sly, and a complete asshole . . . I retained him on the spot. I wanted a cutthroat to go after the feds who had exposed Wanda and me to this travesty.

He required a ten-thousand-dollar retainer. Wanda made the arrangements, and early the next week, Doug announced that he'd moved up the bail
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review hearing to December 10. This pleased me immensely and renewed my faith in the man despite both Wanda and I initially wondering if he was the right choice. He was young enough to be our son. Later, I'd wish he'd been devoured at birth.

Actually, Douglas McCann was not young enough to be the prisoner's son; John was forty-two years old at the time. And one might question John's strategy of selecting a lawyer he hated, especially in this complex case involving multiple counts and multiple jurisdictions. Defender and defendant would need to work closely.

Wanda Orr had to use her home as collateral for her husband's fifty-thousand
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dollar bail, which was set on December 10. Eight days later, the prisoner was released on bail subject to home detention with a transmitter anklet. Once home, Wanda prepared a cup of freshly brewed coffee laced with a shot of Kahlua.

Close friends and family offered loans, and John's mother frequently dropped by to run errands and do Christmas shopping for them while they tried to get by on Wanda's salary. The accused and his wife forged an agreement that he alone would deal with their lawyer, Douglas McCann, and his defense investigators, insulating Wanda from the trauma as much as possible. She was a private person and tried not to talk about the case with friends. She ducked reporters as best she could during a time in which John's face or, rather, photos and videos of him in action as a firefighter were shown almost daily by the print and electronic media.