Fire Lover (52 page)

Two days later, Steve Patterson got a call from Cabral, who said, "Thanks a lot, Mr. Bigmouth! I get you a nice afternoon out with movie people and this is the thanks I get?"

"I hope I didn't get you in trouble," Steve Patterson told him.

Cabral said, "No, it's okay." Then he added, "To tell you the truth, I'd forgotten about Mary Duggan."

After the promised phone call from Herzfeld, Mike Cabral wrote a letter to the Burbank Police Department asking what had became of the vaginal swabs from the Mary Susan Duggan murder investigation of 1986. He informed the police that the District Attorney's Office was interested in pursuing a DNA test to determine if the genetic signature of the killer could be obtained. Cabral was told that a DNA test could be ordered, but would take six months due to the workload at the sheriff's DNA lab.

Mike Cabral went back to his busy life as the D. A.'s arson prosecutor, and pretty much forgot about it again, especially after others in his office said, "Orr's doing life.

What more do you want?"

Cabral could have told them what he'd said to John Orr's jury: that murder victims must not be denied their day in court. Steve Patterson said that's what he wanted for Mary Duggan, who had not lost her entitlement to justice. And that it was not about John Orr, it was about Mary Duggan.

After the six months had passed, Mike Cabral was prodded until he checked on his DNA request and discovered that nothing had been done. The genetic material had been misplaced, so after several frustrating calls to the police detectives and the DNA lab, the Bulldog finally got aroused.

In July 2001, he called Detective Carl Costanzo, Steve Patterson's former partner on the Burbank arson unit, and told him that the D. A. wanted action. Then Cabral asked for the homicide book on Mary Susan Duggan, but was told by the detective, "I'll have to check with my lieutenant on that."

The Burbank police seemed very anxious about being embarrassed if it turned out that there was a DNA match, after all the ridicule that Steve Patterson had endured, after so much time had passed when nothing had been done.

Cabral replied, "No, you don't understand. Tell your lieutenant that the District Attorney's Office is picking up that homicide file today. And I'm taking it home over the weekend to read it."

Only a few people learned about a peculiar thing that had occurred when Steve Patterson had first talked to John Herzfeld about Mary Duggan. Patterson thought that he was finished with his obsessive quest. True, he still kept a copy of the crime file in a bedroom drawer, and he couldn't help thinking of Mary Duggan occasionally. His daughter Jill may have brought it back when she'd experienced life's benchmarks. There was that, but for the sake of his emotional health, he believed that he'd put Mary Duggan away in a safe place and had moved on with his life.

But while he was sitting in his home telling Herzfeld about the murdered girl, a peculiar thing happened: his throat swelled, his voice broke, his eyes filled with burning tears, and he was astonished! Where had that come from?

It became apparent that Mary Susan Duggan, a young woman who'd been murdered and abandoned
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and forgotten by the law
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had not lost her champion after all.

A group from the California Conference of Arson Investigators had an idea that summer. They thought that by this time, John Orr must have mellowed, and might be willing to do something for his former profession in order to set right all of the wrongs. They contacted him at Lompoc and requested permission to visit and shoot a video designed to explore the mind of the serial arsonist.

Perhaps none of them were aware of the seminal work done on psychopathy by Hervey Cleckley, who wrote The Mask of Sanity, a book with a catchy but misleading title that could have been called, more accurately, The Mask of Normalcy. Cleckley and others have pointed out that the psychopathic serial offender wears a mask, and that no one, not even the psychopath himself, peeks behind it except on the rarest of occasions.

John Orr's response to his former colleagues was terse: "If you want to study a serial arsonist, why have you contacted me?"

As summer ended, Mike Cabral became one in a long list of professional prosecutors to fall victim to political maneuverings. The newly elected district attorney decided that prosecutors who had been in the same job for a long time should be transferred. Letters protesting Cabral's ouster were sent by ATF, LAFD, LASD, and many fire chiefs in the Los Angeles area, all to no avail.

His national reputation, for rewriting the ATF course Arson for Prosecutors and for his arson lecture series given to psychologists and psychiatrists, all was deemed extracurricular. Cabral was sent to the Pomona office to handle ordinary cases, but was reminded that Pomona was much closer to the new home he had bought because their fourth child needed special education that only the Temecula school district offered. The girl had been born with a broken chromosome, and had vision, hearing, and learning problems.

However, Mike Cabral was a renowned arson prosecutor. Arson prosecution had always been his passion, so his voice lacked conviction when he told everyone that the arbitrary transfer closer to home was "probably for the best."

On September 11, 2001, John Orr's circumscribed world was immediately touched by the shattering events. Fellow inmate Mohammad Salameh, convicted of the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, was whisked from the unit never to return. He would eventually be transferred to a federal facility where he and the other WTC bombers could be more easily protected from fellow inmates.

A court order was signed by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge in October 2001 to extract blood and saliva from John Leonard Orr at the U. S. Penitentiary in Lompoc for a DNA comparison, reason unspecified. At first, John Orr was worried.

"What're they trying to pin on me?" he said, half joking. "The Chicago Fire? Or maybe ... a murder?"

But then he figured that it had to do with his recent request for a DNA test, claiming it could clear him if there were still traces of DNA material on the cigarette butts used in the incendiary devices.

Mike Cabral saw John's request as a grandstand play to bolster his appeal. Cabral said that John knew very well that the cigarette butt in his trial had been dipped in ninhydrin for fingerprint traces.

But the ploy was okay with Cabral as long as John donated his blood and saliva.

Had John Orr known Cabral's true reason for the DNA test, he'd have said that it was proof that the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office would never rest until they strapped him on a table in San Quentin Prison and killed him.

As he awaited the results of the DNA testing, Steve Patterson said that if there was a match, this fifty-seven-year-old retired firefighter would climb to the top of a promontory and blow a trumpet, as Gunga Din had done in the old movie. But perhaps Steve Patterson had forgotten that Gunga Din got shot down during his moment of greatest glory.

On January 14, 2002, Mike Cabral received a phone call from the DNA laboratory of the L. A. County Sheriff's Department. The material from the vaginal swab taken from the body of Jane Doe Number 39 did not match the DNA from the blood sample of Lompoc inmate John Orr. The killer of Mary Susan Duggan was still at large.

After Cabral phoned Steve Patterson, after profound disappointment, Steve Patterson said, "Well, Mary's DNA and her killer's are finally on file. Maybe now Mary's killer can get caught."

Nothing had changed for him. Hopeful and unyielding, he was ever her champion.

And there was absolutely no more to be done by the People of the State of California in the strange case of John Leonard Orr.

EPILOGUE:

Perhaps it was fitting that the two people who'd tried so hard to be heard, who'd endured bureaucratic indifference and ridicule and sometimes hostility, were classified as law-enforcement officers but were not from the police ranks.

Marvin G. Casey of Bakersfield, though his contribution would always be demeaned by some from the Pillow Pyro Task Force and the D. A.'s Arson Task Force, had solved the mystery of the Central Valley and Central Coast fires of 1987 and 1989. If other law-enforcement officers had been as instinctive and diligent as he, John Orr would have been arrested back then. Whether or not John Orr would have been linked to the Ole's blaze is doubtful, for he probably would not have written Points of Origin, a work that contributed much to putting him in prison for life. So some might argue that when Marv Casey was let down by law enforcement, the Ole's victims got their day in court.

Others would argue that law
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enforcement mistakes
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the classification of the Ole's fire as an accident, the grievous error with the fingerprint, the failures with the tracking device, and the unsatisfying interrogation
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had all been redeemed by law enforcement. By the diligence of Mike Matassa, Glen Lucero, and their task force, and by the tenacity of Walt Scheuerell, Rich Edwards, and their task force, one might say that their work atoned for all of the mistakes, and made the arrest and prosecution of John Leonard Orr a success unlike any other.

In the end, it seems ironic that the most passionate investigators were not career law-enforcement officers, but firefighters. Marv Casey of Bakersfield and Steve Patterson of Burbank were firemen who'd attended training sessions conducted by John Orr and had admired him tremendously. Both Casey and Patterson had brought something extra to the investigation: the zeal and drive to right the wrongs that one of their own had done. The cops from both task forces had never taken the investigation so personally as had the firefighters, for after all, a cop is very different.

A friend and colleague of John Orr, Jim Allen of the state Fire Marshal's Office, a man who'd served at one time as a deputy sheriff and knew both sides of the coin, said: "Firefighters are cooperative, obedient team players. They pull levers, turn valves, man the hose lines, rescue things. Cops look for trouble, make quick decisions, get in people's faces, sometimes kill things. Firemen never really think like cops. Cops never really think like firemen."

The cynicism of law-enforcement professionals had caused a great deal of anxiety for Marv Casey and Steve Patterson, who had nevertheless stubbornly followed their intuition as far as they could. Marv Casey's hunch had been right. Steve Patterson's had not, but no one could say it had been a bad thing for a cruelly murdered girl to have had a zealous champion struggle so long to find justice for her, and, as he put it, a "tiny bit of comfort" for her family. It didn't seem in the end to have been a failure, that Quixotic mission. That quest.

In fact, it seemed most fitting that arson sleuths Marv Casey and Steve Patterson were not police officers, as John Orr had always longed to be. They were firefighters, a vocation that John Orr had only settled for, and one for which he may have been ill suited. If he was what every member of the task force said he was
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a classic psychopath
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then clinically speaking, the firefighter's ultimate reward was of little value and beyond his grasp. And he may have known it.

John Orr himself had often set it forth in his writings, sometimes sardonically, but perhaps a touch wistfully: everybody loves a fireman.