Ex-Glendale, CA, Fire Captain, an Arsonist, Nabbed by His Novel

Soon after the first engine arrived to fight the fatal hardware store blaze in South Pasadena, John Orr materialized and began snapping photos. His presence outside Ole's Home Center on Fair Oaks Avenue in October 1984 did not seem out of place. He was an arson investigator in nearby Glendale, a well-known student of fire with a growing reputation as an instructor. He specialized in how to catch firebugs.

One of his maxims: "The bug is in the crowd."

The Ole's fire killed four people, including a 2-year-old boy and his grandmother. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department quickly ruled it an accident, likely started by electrical wiring. Orr was irate. It had been a slipshod investigation, he announced. Someone may have set this fire deliberately.

Orr's instincts seemed increasingly superhuman as he rose through the ranks at the Glendale Fire Department. He had an uncanny ability to find incendiary devices amid the rubble and charred earth of a fire setter's handiwork. He bragged of catching more than 40 serial arsonists, and explored their methods and psychology in articles for American Fire Journal. When suspicious fires destroyed dozens of homes in the Glendale hills, he appeared on the news as the reassuring face of the department.

In 1991, inspired by a fiction-writing course at Glendale Community College, he was peddling an unusual novel called "Points of Origin." The hero of his manuscript, Phil, is a tenacious, gun-packing arson investigator in L.A.. The villain, Aaron, is a socially stunted pyromaniac who finds sexual arousal in the blazes he sets, and who uses his specialized knowledge as a veteran firefighter to escape detection.

Aaron loves the Santa Ana winds, his ally in havoc. His signature device: a lit cigarette that burns slowly to an ignitable bead of glue, giving him 10 minutes to leave the scene.

In Chapter 6, Orr's villain drops such a device into the foam cushions of a South Pasadena hardware store called Cal's. Four people fail to find their way out and die in terror.

"The fire was ineptly termed accidental," Orr wrote in "Points of Origin." "Aaron wanted the Cal's fire to be [ruled] arson. He loved the inadvertent attention he derived from the newspaper coverage and hated it when he wasn't properly recognized. The deaths were blotted out of his mind. It wasn't his fault. Just stupid people acting as stupid people do."

The FBI would eventually call Orr the most prolific serial arsonist of the 20th century, and when he went on trial for the Ole's fire in 1998, prosecutors presented his manuscript as a thinly veiled memoir of his crimes. His defense attorney put it another way: "We live in L.A. Everyone's got a script or a book they're trying to sell."

Orr grew up in Highland Park, served in the Air Force, and in 1974 found a job at the Glendale Fire Department — then one of the lowest-paying departments in the county — after being rejected by other agencies. The Los Angeles Police Department's psych test had found him unstable, and the L.A. Fire Department had found him physically unfit.

"He wanted to be a cop real bad," said Ed Nordskog, a former bomb investigator who has studied the case. "His crew hated him. He's not a big rugged fireman. He's pudgy, he's prissy, fastidious and neat. Doesn't go in for the pranking and hijinks that firemen do. So he doesn't get along with these guys."

He gravitated to arson investigation, insisted on carrying guns and rose to the rank of captain. A vehement nonsmoker, he kept in his office a cigarette box adorned with a skull and crossbones, to demonstrate their danger. In "Points of Origin," his firefighter-gone-bad is a misfit in his department.

"Although attractive physically and athletically built, Aaron found himself insecure and unable to initiate relationships," Orr wrote. "His conversations were inept and usually self-centered, causing normal people to avoid him. He had no regular friends. Even his co-workers found him difficult to relate to."

During a recent interview with The Times, Orr — now 75 and speaking by phone from Mule Creek State Prison — denied he was describing himself.

"None of those characteristics apply to me. I was quite comfortable in the workplace, at parties. I had lots of friends."

He cobbled together his villain "from two or three of the serial arsonists I apprehended," he insisted. "I gathered as much intelligence as I could when I apprehended these type of people."

It was all fiction, he said, and in Chapter 6 he was just following a writing instructor's advice to "make your antagonist as evil as you can."

He has been making these denials for decades, and no sane writer or documentary filmmaker who has followed the case really hopes for a confession. But considering his claim that "Points of Origin" was so horribly misunderstood, with such catastrophic consequences for him, what is surprising is that he does not regret its authorship.

"I'm not sorry that I wrote it."

Marvin Casey did not get to interrogate John Orr or arrest him or even tag along, which still rankles a little, but Casey did more than anyone to expose Orr's double life.

In 1987, he developed a hunch so grim that no one wanted to listen. He noticed that a spate of suspicious fires coincided with the presence of an arson investigators conference in Fresno. At a Craft-Mart in Bakersfield, where Casey was a fire captain, someone had thrown an incendiary device into the artificial flowers. It consisted of a cigarette, some matches and a piece of lined yellow notebook paper on which a fingerprint turned up.

Was it possible that one of the 200-plus attendees at the conference had done this?

"There's attorneys, there's insurance investigators, and there's fire investigators," Casey recalled. "I didn't know who it was." He thought an arson investigator was most likely, and one who had come to the conference alone, "because arson's kind of a lone, secretive crime."

His theory met resistance from other fire officials. "They didn't want to believe that one of us was doing that," he said.

When another spate of fires sprang up around a 1989 arson sleuth conference near Monterey, Casey cross-referenced a list of attendees with the first list. This generated 10 names, and Orr's was one of them. But an attempt to match his prints to the Craft-Mart device came back negative, and two more years passed.

In spring 1991, a spate of arsons in L.A. County led to the creation of a task force of local cops and agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Using more sophisticated techniques, the Craft-Mart print was matched to Orr, but the lab thought the well-known investigator had just clumsily contaminated the evidence.

"They said, 'Tell John Orr to stop handling evidence,'" Mike Matassa, the ATF case agent, told The Times. "Obviously, everybody froze."

They asked Casey if there was any chance that Orr had touched his evidence. Absolutely not, Casey said.

"When they got the fingerprint, they jumped on this thing like white on rice," Casey said. "They took my case. They just picked it up and ran with it."

The task force kept the investigation carefully compartmentalized. " John Orr is basically a god among arson investigators in the state of California at that time," said Matassa, who had taken classes from Orr and regarded him as arrogant and self-important. "Everybody knew him."

Some of the people they had to tell were Orr's supervisors at the Glendale Fire Department. One of them mentioned that Orr had been trying to sell a novel.

"Have you seen the movie 'JFK'?" Orr asked a reporter when he went on trial in 1992 for the Central Valley fires. He portrayed his book as strictly fiction, the fingerprint a plant and the case against him a government conspiracy. But his conviction resulted in a 30-year federal prison term, and he soon pleaded guilty to three other federal counts of arson, including — crucially — to dropping an incendiary device at a Builders Emporium in North Hollywood in 1990.

This was a boon to L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Cabral, who was preparing to try Orr on the most serious charges yet: Four counts of murder for the fire that had killed Ole's employees Carolyn Kraus and Jimmy Cetina, along with customer Ada Deal and her grandson, Matthew Troidl.

"I said, 'He just pled into our case,'" Cabral told The Times. "We now have a fire that he set in our county."

The defense argued that faulty wiring, not arson, had caused the fire, and Cabral had to explain how the Sheriff's Department had gotten it so wrong in 1984. He attacked the initial investigation as inadequate, run by a sergeant who devoted just 1½ hours to studying the scene before reaching an erroneous conclusion.

Cabral focused on passages in "Points of Origin" that paralleled the Ole's fire scene. He said Orr had dropped an incendiary device in polyfoam at the hardware store, just as his alter ego had in the novel.

Orr was convicted, and during the penalty phase, the defense put on a UCLA psychiatrist who described Orr as a pyromaniac in the grip of an irresistible compulsion he would never admit to. To do so "would demonstrate to him that he's been a failure all of his life," the psychiatrist testified.

This was a bid to spare his life, but prosecutor Sandra Flannery countered with the argument that allowing him to live meant he would "replay the Ole's fire and its pleasure over and over and over again in his mind." The jury deadlocked on whether he should die. He was sentenced to life without parole.

Cabral believes Orr set "probably in excess of 2,000" fires, and thinks he wrote the book in a bid for notoriety. "I don't think he figured anyone would put it together. I think he thought he'd never get caught."

Kary Antholis, a TV producer, followed the Orr case for 30 years and entertained the possibility that he might be innocent. But as he studied the evidence — and found Orr's explanations wanting — his conviction of Orr's guilt hardened. In his podcast "Firebug," Antholis concludes that Orr wrote "Point of Origin" because he wanted to get caught.

He sees in Orr "a combination of self-loathing and emptiness," and "the two things that stave that off are the sacred secret that he has, and the notoriety of having the story out there."

At Mule Creek State Prison, Orr answers journalistic queries promptly, even though he knows the questions will be harsh and the portrait likely ugly. Yet he talks, he said, not because he relishes the attention, but because "I don't want to be known as the guy who refused to cooperate."

He maintains that the feds read his manuscript and decided to frame him. "Well, gee, it must be him, because this is a chronicle of his crimes," Orr said. "It just seemed to be too coincidental for them to ignore."

Why did he plead guilty? To save his wife (now his fourth ex-wife) from bankruptcy. Why allow his lawyers to portray him as a pyro? He had no choice. He had an ironclad alibi, in fact, but his lawyers wouldn't listen.

He still writes — penning articles for the prison newspaper, the Mule Creek Post, with headlines such as "Finding Christmas cheer in dreary confines" and "How to escape prison — through the library."

"I haven't written fiction for quite a while," he said.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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