Fire Lover (45 page)
After the noon recess, Sandra Flannery was first up with rebuttal. She apologized about the trial seeming to have gone on endlessly, and promised she wouldn't go on endlessly, and then she and Mike Cabral went on almost endlessly.
She started with the Hilldale and San Augustine fires, reiterating all of it, beginning with how John Orr had gotten there quickly. She theorized that the defendant had set one fire, set a delay device at the other, gone home and switched from his own car into the Teletracked city car, then had gone back to the fire scene where the tracking device picked him up.
It was a sort of bad-guy-in-his-own-car, good-guy-in-the-arson-car theory, which mirrored what Sandra Flannery and Mike Cabral privately thought about John Leonard Orr. They believed that he had been the man at the College Hills apartment house who had tried to warn the occupants to get out. They believed it was the good half of John Orr who'd spoken to the press after the College Hills calamity when he said he thought the arsonist "hadn't meant" to touch off such a major disaster. They saw him as both firefighters in Points of Origin, two people in one skin, constantly at war with each other.
After going point by point through the testimony, she then addressed the psychological premise in Peter Giannini's defense. She said, "Does the fact that John Orr was under investigation prior to the time of setting these remaining fires suggest that he dared not set these fires? There's a significant change in the type of fires. You no longer see the fires set in open retail establishments during business hours with a time-delay device."
When she got to the Warner Brothers fire, it was to bring up more Teletrac argument that he'd been close to Warner Brothers. But there were too many Evil Twin timing problems, with him in two places at once, so she did little to remind the jury that the Warner Brothers director of security testified that he'd seen John Orr enter while the fire was burning. Task
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force members admitted that when all was said and done the Teletrac testimony was about as explosive as a mouse fart.
College Hills was her major arson, so she devoted most of her rebuttal to it. In fact, she got a bit sardonic for the first time, and said, "In reference to John Orr's weed
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abatement program, he talked about transient arsonists that go from town to town setting brush fires everywhere. I guess the transients must've gotten word of John Orr's weed-abatement program and stopped setting fires, because a photograph taken not long ago shows plenty of brush at the College Hills area. It's always nice to have transients to blame things on."
She made an attempt to explain the eyewitness who hadn't recognized John Orr when he'd stood in her apartment, saying that the defendant had been in the bathroom doorway, so the witness hadn't really gotten a good look. After defending the air force major with the photographic mind, she then introduced a new ingredient to the stew being served. She said that in one of John Orr's weed-abatement memos to Chief Gray a year before the College Hills fire, he'd considered starting a small business in the field of fire-insurance survey.
It was the first insinuation to the jury that there could even have been a sinister profit motive connected with the brush fires, an insinuation that the defense would get no chance to refute.
When Mike Cabral got up that afternoon, he promised to keep it brief but this jury had heard that one before. He went after each of the defense witnesses who'd seemed contradictory, and made a clever point about the testimony of the Ole's employee who'd said that the leaking ceiling had left a huge hole, something that the defense had used in saying there'd been a gap where a smoldering attic fire could've dropped down.
Cabral turned it around and said, "It is inconsistent with a slow smoldering attic fire if it, in fact, existed, and was as big as she said. We don't have, and all the experts agree on this point, we don't have a slow, smoldering fire that's oxygen starved, because we've got a huge hole in the roof where the fire would've pulled oxygen out."
He was saying that a big ceiling hole hurts the defense theory more than the prosecution's. With a big breathing area, an attic fire would not have smoldered slowly, but would've raged swiftly.
Alluding to the defense contention that it was not a really rapid fire, he said, "All that polyfoam is hissing, burning, that deep blue flame and the blue-greenish flame that Captain Eisele talked about. Look what Mr. Obdam says, five to ten minutes he had to get out of the building. Well, I don't know. Five minutes? I'm sitting in this place and somebody tells me I've got five minutes to get out before that whole place is engulfed in flames and I'm dead. That's a rapid fire. We got a sixteen
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thousand-square-foot building. They don't even know where they're at. The people submit to you the evidence shows that those people were dropped to the ground long before ten minutes ever came."
When he came to ceiling tiles showing more fire damage on the attic side and confusing the investigator at the scene, he said that after the firefighters had vented the roof, the attic side of the fire burned freely where they couldn't get water on it. He said that paint on the beams did not burn equally as it would have if a fire had charged the whole attic, and that some beams burned and some didn't because the fire had risen up from down below. Moreover, he said, the burning on the attic side of the ceiling tiles could've been caused after the roof collapsed and formed a lean-to space where the fire kept burning the top side of the tiles until the firefighters could put it out.
Cabral was stopped by the clock at 4:00 p. M. on Thursday, but was back at them the next morning, again trying to dismantle the testimony of defense experts by pointing out that a lot of their testimony had been based on two-dimensional photographs, making it impossible to tell anything about the depth of char. And no juror, nor anyone else with a smidgin of common sense, could fail to conclude that the entire business of fire investigation was enormously subjective, more of an art than a science, especially if one looked at photos of the pile of rubble that had faced investigators out there on the morning after Ole's had been ravaged by an inferno.
In a way, Mike Cabral made that point himself when he said, "So what does that leave us? Do we want to eliminate all of these experts? The people submit we probably can, and still decide the how. They've given you a great deal of information about how fire progresses, and on top of that you have a great deal of information about how this fire progressed. On top of that, you have the defendant's statements telling you what happened."
Well, that perked up the dozing jurors. Defendant's statements? John Orr had sat there for weeks and never uttered a peep.
"He told Karen Berry what happened," Cabral said. "He told Jim Fitzpatrick what happened. That's all you need. That's all you need: the fire-scene background and the testimony of the defendant establishes what happened and establishes it beyond a reasonable doubt."
So after goosing the jurors with a cattle prod, he'd gone back to smacking them with a pig bladder. He'd only been referring to those post-Ole's opinions back in 1984 that John Orr had offered to various people.
He resumed the technical dissertation and repeated what they'd heard from the lips of witnesses who'd been in Ole's on the night of the fire. The prosecutor reminded the jury that Albertson's Market in Pasadena was seven miles from Ole's, and that Von's Market was only a few blocks from Ole's. Then he told them that the experts had testified that the incendiary device would allow a fifteen
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to twenty
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minute delay. Then he gave them his time line, after the Von's device was set.
"So he's at Ole's," Cabral said. "He places his device in the location. He calls Verdugo. He's told he's dispatched to Albertson's. He drives for ten minutes. That gets him to Albertson's at seven-fifty
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seven. He's there ten minutes. That would be eight-oh-seven. He gets back to Ole's, eight-seventeen. So we've got five minutes there that he can play with."
Rich Edwards had driven the route at various times, careful to observe the speed limit, and allowing time to enter Ole's and set a delay device. It was a very close time line, Edwards had concluded.
Cabral then decided to try to square the time at Albertson's Market with the fifteen or twenty minutes that Investigator McClure had recalled somewhat hazily, and he ended with, "Plenty of time, ladies and gentlemen. Plenty of time."
The prosecutor was suggesting that the defendant could have set a device at Von's at 7:40, and in his Mario Andretti mode, raced several blocks to Ole's to set another at 7:50, then sped several miles to Albertson's for a look-see, racing back to Ole's by 8:22 p. M. where he'd called Verdugo Dispatch from a public phone booth.
Plenty of time? No. Possible? Maybe. If the investigation at Albertson's had lasted five minutes rather than fifteen or twenty.
Proof that the courtroom was nodding off showed itself by the fact that nobody even laughed when Mike Cabral was trying to flip to his advantage some testimony from the Ole's defense witness named Beatrice, who'd testified to the hole in the ceiling where ceiling tiles had never been replaced.
Cabral said, "And it's the opening that gives the opportunity for the smell of smoke. The aerosols, not the fire itself. What would you expect to smell, in reference to Beatrice's hole?"
Toward the end, Mike Cabral got to the novel Points of Origin, particularly to the ice cream incident, implying that John Orr was not as creative as his lawyer implied, that perhaps he'd heard the little boy in the store begging his grandmother for ice cream.
"No other investigator said there was an arson," Cabral said, pointing his finger. "Only one. That man right there. The only person who said this was an arson, and then wrote a book about it. Only one person, who then, several years later, admitted taking a cigarette, three matches, wrapping them in a rubber band, putting them in a piece of paper, and setting fires to stores. In polyfoam. Only one person, the defendant.
"And I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that the evidence in this case is overwhelming, that the defendant, on October tenth, 1984, entered that store, set it on fire in the polyfoam, and caused the death of those four people. And I ask you to return a verdict of guilty."
So, on Friday, June 12, 1998, the case against John Leonard Orr ended as it had begun, with a reminder that he'd pled guilty to the Builder's Emporium fire in North Hollywood. Observers could only wonder how it would have ended if John Orr had gone to trial in federal court in Los Angeles and been convicted, just as he had in Fresno, but had not pled guilty. Would the dynamic of this murder trial have changed?
Once again, John Orr waived his right to be present for the read-back and jury questions, preferring to return to a nine-by
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nine-foot cage at the county jail rather than to remain in the tank where strange fish swim.
The jury in the case of the People v. John Orr would deliberate for a full two weeks, and during the first week there were some things going on in the courtroom. One of the alternate jurors wrote a note asking if he could be excused for a conference out of state if deliberations were not over by June 16.
Ed Rucker, who'd noticed that particular alternate juror during trial, asked, "Was he asleep when he wrote that? Or is this one of the few times he was awake?"
The judge said, "I did watch him. And every time I thought it was time to kind of shake him, he would stir and move his eyes, so I do not think he was sleeping."
By Friday, June 26, Cabral made a motion asking that redacted portions of the manuscript be allowed back into the case if the defendant was found guilty and the trial proceeded to the penalty phase.
Rucker objected strongly, saying, "They're extremely inflammatory. They're very, very damaging. And we cannot say with any certainty that these are the feelings and emotions of the defendant. It is not a direct admission. It's not a confession, but the people will characterize it as such.
"Having created a fictional character, ascribed emotions to this character ... to then assume that these are the emotions or the reactions of the defendant, given the highly prejudicial nature of those statements and the very callous nature of those statements, I would hope the court would exercise some caution here."
At 11:00 a. M. that day, after exactly two weeks of deliberations, the jury sent a note to the judge, saying, "We have reached a verdict on all but one count. We do not believe further deliberation would be of any value. What would the court want us to do at this point?"
After noon recess, the jury came back to the courtroom they'd left two weeks earlier, and handed the verdicts to the bailiff who handed them to the clerk.
Judge Perry said to a media-packed courtroom: "All right. The clerk will now read the verdicts."
The clerk read: "We, the jury in the above-entitled case, find the defendant, John Leonard Orr, guilty of the crime of first-degree murder, in violation of penal code section one-eight-seven-A, a felony, as charged in count one of the indictment. This twenty-sixth day of June, 1998. Juror Number Five, foreperson."
So it went through counts two, three, and four, including the special
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circumstances allegation of multiple murder. And then through all of the rest, all through the College Hills counts, clear through count twenty-five, all except for count six.