Fire Lover (49 page)

She said, "I believe he mentioned that he had applied, and was not offered a job. But I don't really remember why."

"Did he explain to you anything about how he felt about that event?" Cabral asked.

"He seemed quite disappointed," she replied.

"Did he seem angry at being rejected?"

"It has been twenty years," she said.

"Did the defendant ever tell you during this relationship how he felt in relation to police officers?"

"I seem to recall that he felt like he was smarter than the average cop." Then she said, "And he probably is."

"Did he ever do anything that you considered to be playing games to get away with things?"

"Whenever we would meet on duty, he would like to kiss me while I was in uniform, which I was very uncomfortable with because we were not supposed to do it. But he would kiss me on duty. It didn't happen often, a very few times."

"Anything else like that?" Cabral asked.

And at last, the courtroom rail birds were going to get a chance to hear something titillating. About John Orr getting his mongoose milked by an honest-to-God cop. In full uniform. In a place where they could both get caught and fired. The risk! The symbolism of it all!

But what did the rail birds get
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those poor old pensioners who wander the courts, clickety-clacking when they whisper because they can't afford Fixodent? What did they get?

"Are you referring to an incident in the basement of the firehouse?" she asked Cabral.

And of course, he was. But Mike Cabral faltered and said, "No, I'm not."

And the judge, knowing full well what had gone on in the firehouse basement, proved Cabral's trepidation was well grounded by saying, "We're not."

Cabral forged on halfheartedly: "Did you feel that the defendant had the attitude that he was going to do things to get away with it, and pull the wool over the eyes of the police department?"

"I seem to have the impression that he had that kind of attitude. John is a very bright man, and I believe he knew it."

"Did you form some conclusions about the defendant's behavior?"

"I think he has some sociopathic tendencies, but I am not an expert witness on sociopaths," she replied.

"Did you find him to be manipulative during your relationship?"

"Yes."

"And how would that show itself?"

She said, "It's been so long, Mr. Cabral. I really can't come up with any examples."

Gathering his courage for one last try, Cabral asked, "Other than the basement incident?"

"I am sorry?" she said, not quite hearing him.

"Other than the basement incident?" he repeated, louder.

"Yes," was all she said.

And Mike Cabral's yin and yang must have been fighting the impulse to yell: "Yes, girl, the basement incident. Spit it out. Why do you think we flew you here? The goddamn basement incident!"

But Cabral uttered a plaintive: "I have no further questions, Your Honor." And he gave up.

The judge was not impressed that this witness had demonstrated anything relevant regarding John Orr's alleged need to strike back at law enforcement, so he said, "I don't think you have made it, Mr. Cabral. I will sustain the objection by the defense. Thank you."

"I am free to leave?" the witness asked, relieved that she was not going to be made to tell the world what she'd told Cabral about "manually manipulating" him in the basement of that firehouse, about the weasel whacking from a real cop in a real uniform, wearing a real police shield, not a bogus badge like the one he'd carried as a Sears security officer.

As she was walking by the counsel table John Orr gave her a wave and mouthed: "Thank you." And she got outraged!

She waited outside the corridor for Cabral, and demanded to go back on the stand and tell everyone about the "incident in the basement." How dare he think she'd slanted her testimony for him!

"Too late," Cabral told her. Too late. Too freaking late.

Then the Glendale city employee was called, and told the jury the same story to which she'd testified out of their presence about the inferred offer to torch her car for insurance money.

Rucker didn't bother to cross-examine her, and the people at last rested. But then the four lawyers and the judge haggled over jury instructions, variations of those the jury had already heard. And they went on and on about mitigating factors, and aggravating factors, and they started citing cases, until even the most die-hard rail birds had flown to more promising feeding grounds in their never-ending search for stories more wretched than their own.

When the jury was brought out for the last time, they were read the jury instructions, and Judge Perry reminded them that there is no burden of proof in the penalty phase, and that this time the defense would have the last word.

Sandra Flannery was the first prosecution lawyer, and she said, "Well, I thought I would begin by wishing you a good morning, but I do have to say, to come to you on behalf of the people of the state of California and ask you to impose the penalty of death causes me hesitation to ever call this a good morning. But that is what I am here to do. And I do ask you to choose for John Orr the penalty of death."

She told them that they were the "conscience of the community," and that they were here "because of John Orr's choices."

"It was not an impulsive act," she said. "It was an act done with great deliberation. It was a choice. With each match that John Orr took out of that matchbook he made a choice. As he positioned those matches on that cigarette in just the right manner, at just the right position to create the amount of delay that he wanted and that he needed, he made a choice. He used his specialized knowledge of fire dynamics to set a fire in a place and in a manner that would send that fire racing against life itself. That was the choice.

"He could have set his device anywhere he wanted. But he chose to go onto the side where there were no ceiling sprinklers. He made that choice. You see, when it came to his own personal safety, and the safety of his family, John Orr was keenly aware of fire dangers and chose to prevent them. But when it came to the safety of the people at Ole's, John Orr was keenly aware of the fire dangers and chose to exploit them.

"He knew, based upon his specialized knowledge of fire dynamics, that by going to the housewares department and choosing to place his ignition device in the polyfoam, he would be setting a fire of inescapable proportion. John Orr would like you to believe that he was driven by some obsessive compulsion to set fires, and yet if that were the case, how did he restrain himself enough to make it to the polyfoam stack, which he knew would ignite as though it were petroleum itself?

"He alone knew how many minutes separated life from death. He was as much a killer as someone who shoots their victims face-to-face. Only how John Orr did it was with so much more terror and deception. Under the guise of being the protector of good, John Orr was in fact the perpetrator of evil.

"John Orr, through his job, was given power, but that power was not enough. He needed more power and he wanted more power, and he set his fires to gain that power. I guess you could say that knowledge is power. If that is the case, then isn't it also true that secret knowledge is secret power? He had secret knowledge and that gave him secret power over the lives of other people through setting the fires, watching their reactions, seeing who would survive.

"How long did his delay last? Ten minutes perhaps. When you deliberate in the jury room, take ten minutes to be alone with your thoughts. Ten minutes is a very long time to reflect upon what is the right thing to do. And yet in those ten minutes did John Orr make the choice to turn around?

"He could have gone back. He could have extinguished his device. But instead he chose to let his device burn and extinguish the lives of Carolyn Krause, Jimmy Cetina, Ada Deal, and Matthew Troidl. Then, as the fire burned and ravaged the inside of that building, where was John Orr? He was outside taking photographs.

"The defense has suggested to you that there's some type of obsessive-compulsive behavior going on, driving John Orr to set these fires. A doctor came in and suggested that in three interviews he had gotten to know the real John Orr. But I suggest to you that each of you have gotten to know the real John Orr. John Orr's fires were moral decisions. He chose to set them. The mere inability to understand why someone can do something, and have an outlook on life that is so different from yours, doesn't transform that outlook into a mental illness.

"John Orr had an attitude about life. His attitude was that he wanted power, that he was superior to others, that he could create circumstances and situations that no one could figure out but him. He had secret knowledge that gave him secret power.

"To not require the ultimate penalty for the ultimate crime would be to diminish and devalue those lives that were taken. It would be an act of cruelty to the victims, under the mistaken belief that you are extending compassion to the defendant. If John Orr is permitted to live and replay the Ole's fire and its pleasure over and over and over again in his mind, then it will be as though he has killed Carolyn Krause, Jimmy Cetina, Ada Deal, and Matthew Troidl over and over again. Thank you."

It was easily Sandra Flannery's best work. Lawyer-spectators in the courtroom were impressed with her flashes of eloquence in a long trial that had seen so little of it.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Peter Giannini began, "John Orr will be punished in this case. As a society you will be protected from him. The only question is not will he get out of prison. The only question is when. Will he die, because you say he must die, by lethal injection? Or will he die when God decides that he dies, if he is sentenced to life without the possibility of parole? It is a long, slow, tedious kind of death. Is it worse than death? I don't think so. I think life is sacred. Every life is sacred. John's life is also sacred.

"Every one of you individually is being called upon to make one of the most difficult decisions of your life, and it is not a collective decision. It is your decision individually. There is nobody else to turn to. If every single one of you doesn't agree that death is the appropriate punishment, it isn't.

"What did God do? What did he do when Cain killed Abel? He put a mark on his head, set him out to wander alone in the world. He banished him. He gave him life without the possibility of parole.

"The prosecutor said in her closing statement that the ultimate crime deserves the ultimate punishment. You have to ask yourself is this the ultimate crime? There are thousands of homicides in the county of Los Angeles every year. Very few of those are death-penalty cases where you get to first-degree murder with special circumstances. Where you have to start talking about the possibility of a penalty phase. What does that mean in this case? The only special circumstance charged against John Orr in this case is that more than one person died in that fire. If everything else about this case was the same, everything else you had heard in this case was identical, but only one person died in that fire, we wouldn't be in this phase of the case. There'd be no penalty phase."

Despite the hyperbole about thousands of homicides, that argument by Peter Giannini probably represented his finest moment in the case, effectively exposing the quirkiness of the law: One arson murder, no capital crime. Two arson murders, capital crime.

"I think his history speaks for itself," Giannini said. "He's extremely sick. He's not normal. He lacks the kind of control the rest of us have. With John Orr it's always the same or similar conduct. Repeated conduct. It's a compulsion. The testimony of Dr. Markman is uncontradicted. The people could have put a psychiatrist up here to say there's nothing wrong with this guy. They chose not to do that. You have to ask yourself why. I think the reason is because he does suffer from a mental defect. He couldn't stop himself. He knew he was suspected. He knew he was being tracked."

So it was Peter Giannini himself who became the one to confront the premise of his earlier argument, that John Orr was too smart to have torched Warner Brothers, Kennington, and San Augustine, knowing that he was probably being tracked. Giannini had at last decided that compulsion trumps intelligence.

"When this trial is over, you're going to want to put it behind you. If you vote to kill him, it might not be that easy to do. You'll have to live with it for the rest of your lives. The challenge here is to punish him, to protect all of us, and to hold John Orr responsible for the rest of his life for what he did. And the challenge here, I think, is to do that without losing sight of our own human values, our higher values, and our ability to show mercy.

"It's never wrong, it's never weak, it's never a mistake to let somebody live. However you might feel about John, you've got to take pity on his father, his mother, his daughters, his four-year-old grandchild. These are innocent people too. They haven't done anything. If you kill him, you're going to destroy them. An eighty
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three-year-old man is sitting back there. Let them live out their final years without the horror of John's execution ruining their lives every day. His grandson needs his grandfather to be alive. How do you say, 'My grandfather was executed at San Quentin'? If you do this, you're condemning him too.