The Killer Book of Cold Cases (7 page)

Orr seemed to have a very good chance of becoming a cop with the Los Angeles Police Department. He passed the various physical and mental tests, and he had done fire-investigation work in the Air Force, which looked good on a resume.

The final step was to pass the psychological part of the test. When Orr spoke to the interviewing psychiatrist, he said that his life was all “Ozzie and Harriet,” meaning that he had a sitcom life with no serious problems. But Orr said later that the psychiatrist, who was young, had thought Orr had said Ozzy Osbourne, a rock-and-roll artist who once bit the head off a bat while on stage.

The truth was that his mother had deserted his father when Orr was sixteen. She returned to her native Missouri and didn’t see her son again until he was nineteen. His father was dealing with a business failure and became morbidly depressed when his wife left, causing Orr to worry that his father would kill himself. As it happened, his mother never saw his father again, choosing not to rejoin the family when she returned to Los Angeles.

Orr was rejected by the LAPD, and he became distraught. The psychiatrist report stated:

But Orr had an out. He had applied to and was accepted by the Glendale Fire Department, which started him as a probationary fireman. In February 1975, he was made a permanent fireman. Having been raised in an area of Los Angeles that abutted Glendale, he knew the terrain well.

On the job, he was a fanatic—at police work. He would tell people that being appointed to the LAPD was not a big deal, but during his entire career as a firefighter, he acted like a cop. He became an ace at catching shoplifters at a 7-Eleven where he worked part time, and eventually he wheedled his way into a part-time security job at Sears that was normally given only to cops—and he was outstanding at it. In addition, he often commented about how arrogant cops were to think they were better than firefighters.

Orr worked hard at his job with the Glendale FD and eventually rose through the ranks to become the department’s top arson investigator. He investigated fires on everything from hillsides to homes to commercial buildings, and he caught a serial arsonist—a man who was setting fire to the hillsides around Glendale. He also started to write paid articles for the
American Fire Journal
. His reputation as a firefighter continued to grow.

What wasn’t working out was his love life. By 1984 he had been in three unsuccessful marriages and had cheated on all of his wives. He also was working his way through firefighter partners, who he always seemed to find inadequate in one way or another.

Then, on January 13, 1987, what would turn out to be a momentous event occurred. Orr was attending the three-day California Conference of Arson Investigators in Fresno. As Wambaugh writes in his book
The Fire Lover
, “That conference might have come and gone and passed from memory except for the stunning events that took place starting on the first evening…”

At around 8:30 p.m., a Payless Drug Store on North Blackstone Avenue in Fresno caught fire. But the blaze was extinguished, thanks to a determined manager with a fire extinguisher and sprinklers that doused the fire with huge volumes of water.

But then the event that got everyone’s attention occurred. Another fire broke out, this also on Blackstone Avenue but at Hancock Fabrics. Unlike the fire at the Payless store, the one in Hancock demonstrated how horrifically scary fire can be, with clouds of smoke turning into fires and fingers of flame racing up a wall. The fire was quick and destroyed just about everything in the store. The point of origin—where the fire started—was found to be a display of Styrofoam pellets used to stuff pillows. Whoever had started the fire certainly knew what burned best. Styrofoam burns unbelievably fast.

The next day, arson investigators pored over what was left, and almost unbelievably, they found the simple device that the arsonist had used to start the fire, in this case, a partially burned cigarette attached by a rubber band to three matches.

Later at the House of Fabrics, also on Blackstone Avenue, an employee found a similar incendiary device in a bin filled with foam pillows. A fire had started, blackening a nearby wall, but it had gone out. Like the first device, the one found at the House of Fabrics consisted of matches and a cigarette held together by a rubber band.

All told, three fires had occurred in one day on the same street. The odds of that happening without an arsonist being involved were just about zero. Then yet another fire occurred on January 16, the day the arson conference ended, in the town of Tulare, which was about an hour south of Fresno. The fire occurred at a Surplus City outlet in a bin filled with sleeping bags.

Less than an hour later, a fire erupted in the Family Bargain Center in nearby Bakersfield. The foam pillows were on fire, but the manager pulled them out of the bin and put the fire out. At the bottom of the bin, the manager found a partly burned cigarette and three matches, all held together with a rubber band, and some scraps of yellow lined paper.

But that wasn’t the end. About an hour later, at 2 p.m., an employee of CraftMart in Bakersfield spotted smoke and fire in a dried-flower floral display, and the manager put out the fire with an extinguisher.

The fire captain at the scene thought the CraftMart fire should be examined by an arson investigator and called in Captain Marvin G. Casey of the Bakersfield Fire Department. Casey had more than twenty years of experience determining the cause of fires and had examined hundreds.

He looked over the dried flowers that had ignited and spotted the same kind of incendiary device that had been used to start other blazes: three matches and a lit cigarette bundled in yellow lined paper and held together by rubber bands. Using tweezers, Casey carefully extracted the device from the bin and laid it in an evidence container.

Casey had also investigated the Hancock Fabrics fire in Fresno, and he commented to a fellow investigator that having two fires occur with an hour of one another and within two miles defied coincidence.

As he investigated the Bakersfield fires, Casey was aware of the fires in Tulare and Fresno. Then he learned that the incendiary devices recovered were all about the same and that the materials the fires were set in—some type of foam—were very much alike. And all the fires had occurred near Highway 99. All told, someone had started or attempted to start seven fires at stores along the road from Fresno to Tulare to Bakersfield.

Casey had an insight. He was aware of the arson conventions, and he started to think that maybe the fire starter was one of the 242 attendees.

The ATF—the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives—had descended on the arson cases, so Casey gave the incendiary device to them to see if they could pull any prints off it. As it happened, they could. They pulled a single left ring-finger print off the device. The print was submitted to the California and national fingerprint criminal databases, but the report came back negative. The print didn’t belong to a criminal.

Conversations with other investigators didn’t produce any support for Casey’s idea that their arsonist might be an arson investigator. Ego may have gotten in the way in this case. How could a firefighter be the arsonist? Ridiculous! But Casey’s enthusiasm for the idea didn’t dampen.

Casey made a couple of phone calls, got a list of the attendees at the convention, and devised a way to winnow down the list. Starting with the participants’ home bases, he only looked at investigators whose trip home would take them south past Fresno, Tulare, and Bakersfield. Then he calculated which of the men would have been driving alone, because arsonists almost always travel alone.

Using his method of elimination, he produced a list of fifty-five arson investigators who fulfilled the criteria. Because the investigators came from different jurisdictions, Casey knew he would have to get the Feds involved. He called the ATF in Fresno, spoke with Special Agent Chuck Gaylan, and told him about his theory. Like others, Gaylan was skeptical and asked, “Fifty-five names of respected arson investigators?”

As reported in
Fire Lover,
Gaylan said: “I wasn’t at all comfortable with this. I knew some of them. They were neat guys with lots of integrity. I certainly didn’t think that Marv Casey’s intuition was worth a wholesale inquiry into travel records and so forth.”

So nothing happened, and Casey’s theory went nowhere. Then at the beginning of 1989, another arson investigator conference occurred, this time in Pacific Grove, which is near Monterey. The four-day conference was set to begin on March 5.

The same thing happened at this conference that had happened at the earlier one: fires started to break out in various stores where foam products were stored. Casey knew that all the towns were south of where the conference was being held, just as had happened at the other arson conference.

This time, Casey thought of a way to compile an even smaller list of potential arsonist suspects from the list of arson investigators attending the conference. He got a list of the attendees and only included those from the Los Angeles area who would have had the opportunity to set the fires on their way to or from the conference.

So instead of fifty-five possible suspects, he had only ten. He would be able to check the print found on the incendiary device to see if it belonged to any of them because they all were public employees and their prints would be on file.

All ten print cards were drawn from the database, and Casey had an ATF fingerprint expert check them out at the Department of Justice Crime Lab in Fresno. The results of the fingerprint examination were sent to a special agent at the ATF, and he relayed the results to Casey. There was no match.

The arsonist’s work continued with a vengeance. Starting in 1990 and ending in March 1991, it got even worse. The Los Angeles area was hit with what were determined to be nineteen arson fires or attempted arson fires. Fortunately, no more lives were lost, but fire experts knew that it was just a matter of time.

Marv Casey had never stopped championing his theory that the arsonist would turn out to be an arson investigator, despite the fact that none of the ten investigators could be tied to the print found on the incendiary device.

Then the string of arsons got the Feds interested, and though none of them really believed that the print from CraftMart was of any value, they decided to test it again. After all, two years had passed since the earlier test. Maybe the Pillow Pyro, as a number of task forces called the serial arsonist, had been arrested since 1989.

The print was tested again, and Ron George who worked in the laboratory, called the ATF’s Pillow Pyro task force. He told the ATF agent who answered, “You oughta tell your arson investigators to keep their mitts off the evidence. It was touched by John Orr. Left ring finger.”

Many investigators were devastated when they heard the news that Orr appeared to be the arsonist. People respected John Leonard Orr as a firefighter and a person, but now they had to accept something incontrovertible: the federal fingerprint expert had made a mistake earlier when he compared the partial print of a left ring finger to those of the arson investigators. There had been a match, but because the fingerprint expert missed it, Orr was able to set many more fires. Thankfully, they had not taken any more lives.

Investigators did not pick Orr up at first. They had to build a case. The ATF and other investigators decided put him under surveillance, which included installing a tracking device under his car’s rear bumper. The device somehow dropped down so it was visible, but Orr didn’t seem to know what it was. Authorities set up a scam, indicating that the device was a fake bomb installed as a prank, and Orr seemed to believe that. They believed that Orr did know later about the tracking device. However, he did not know about another tracking device called a Teletrac that was installed in the dashboard of his car when he brought it in for servicing on November 22, 1991.