Fire Lover Page 3

  “There should’ve been investigators present at the autopsies of the victims,” he told her. “Polypropylene may have left particles in the victim’s lungs or in their tracheas. Or there may have been gases present that were absorbed by the bodies, and it might’ve come out in a proper autopsy.”

  If there had been investigators there knowing what to look for. But there were not, and now no one would ever know.

  Two months after the Ole’s calamity in South Pasadena, another disaster nearly befell that unfortunate company. The Ole’s Home Center on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena barely escaped a similar fate. A partially burned incendiary device was found by an employee.

  Arson investigators called it a “signature device”: the cigarette, the three paper matches, and a rubber band. It was found in a partially burned stack of polyfoam that had been scorched but hadn’t fully ignited. This signature device was known only to local arson investigators, who hadn’t publicized it—therefore, it couldn’t be a copycat. Some wondered if the fire setter had graduated from potato chips to bigger targets.

  Another possibility would not be considered for some time to come: by attacking the second Ole’s store, perhaps a fire setter was making a statement to the entire arson-investigating community—that they had got it wrong the first time.

  2

  THE WANNA-BE

  John Leonard Orr described in a memoir how two events early in his life may have foretold his future as a prominent Southern California arson investigator. The first involved a residential blaze that could have been fatal to three classmates who set fire to a sofa in their home. John and his two brothers stood in a rainstorm and watched while firefighters battled in vain to save the house.

  Then, some weeks later, he had occasion to observe another fire, this one in an alley, a trash fire that had ignited a telephone pole. One of his friends had called the Los Angeles Fire Department, and they all watched Engine 55, a bullet-nosed Seagrave, coming to the rescue, red lights blinking, the old-fashioned “growler” siren moaning quietly when the rig stopped, waiting. Waiting for what? Young John began yelling that the pole was on fire! Still, the engine wouldn’t budge.

  Years later, after he was firefighter, he understood that Engine 55 was waiting for a “first-in” report from the other engine before committing itself as the second. But it was painfully frustrating, waiting for that engine to thunder forward and attack. John never forgot how the ash spilled from the cardboard box that was the fire’s point of origin. He described how he searched up and down the alley that day for evidence of who may have started it.

  As the years passed, the boy developed a love of hunting. He hunted with bows or guns, stalking small animals in the foothills. Once, when he and his pals were out near the western side of Mount Washington, desperate for action, they spotted a skunk shambling through the brush on a hillside trail. John let fly with a barbed hunting arrow that fatally penetrated the creature’s throat.

  The skunk emitted its horrendous reek as it died, and the young hunter wondered: Why did I kill it? I can’t eat it. A skunk was certainly not a trophy kill. It wasn’t even a game animal. And now he had to retrieve his costly arrow, and his young friends thought his impulsive skunking was hilarious. He was always impulsive and he was always hunting, for one thing or another.

  Whenever John Orr had to take preemployment or prepromotion psychological exams during his career as a civil servant—whenever an examiner asked him to summarize his childhood in the 1950s and 1960s—he would always say, “It was all Ozzie and Harriet,” conjuring images of that happy, middle-class, bygone television family.

  His father had owned a sporting-goods store on York Boulevard in the old northeastern corner of metropolitan Los Angeles known as Highland Park. His business failed, as did the next, but they got by. The Orrs’ two-bedroom, wood-frame house was behind the home of John’s grandparents in a neighborhood where the Orrs had lived for more than forty years.

  When he was sixteen, John’s Ozzie-and-Harriet world imploded with no explanation or warning. His mother left home without telling anyone where she was going, only that she would call in a few days. John’s eldest brother had already moved away, and his other brother was in the navy. Now he was alone with his father, and began to have morbid fears that his dad just might be so grief stricken that he’d take down one of the hunting rifles. But his mother did call after several days to say that she’d gone to her childhood home in Missouri, so father and son learned to cope. He didn’t see her again for nearly three years, and she never returned to his father when she came back to L.A.

  When one of the recent high-school graduates was killed in Vietnam, John Orr realized his options were college, Canada, or military service. On career day, when he was a senior, he talked to an L.A. Fire Department captain who told him that fire-fighting experience in the military was as good as a degree in fire science. The navy wouldn’t work for him because, strangely enough for a California boy, he couldn’t swim, and he didn’t like the machismo of the marines, so he joined the air force, leaving on his eighteenth birthday, April 26, 1967, for Amarillo Air Force Base.

  After basic training he was assigned to a jet mechanic’s school at Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois, but soon managed to transfer to fire-fighting school, where he learned such skills as how to operate pumps and shoot chemical foam from turrets onto training fires.

  By 1968, the young airman married his high-school girlfriend, Jody, and after a big Italian wedding paid for by her family, they shipped out for Seville, Spain, where he was assigned to an air base near the commercial airport. However, during his two-year tour in Spain he only got to respond to two air crashes.

  In the winter of 1970, John and Jody were transferred to Great Falls, Montana, where the only real fire he ever got was a minor off-duty blaze. His military fire-fighting life was exceedingly uneventful, and he was honorably discharged on his twenty-second birthday in April 1971, when Jody was seven months pregnant.

  As he later recalled it, John was very resentful of authority after leaving the military. He affected a cocky demeanor—compensating, he said, for repressed feelings of insecurity. But he was eager for a career. Though there were many applicants and few positions available at that time, he applied to the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the City of Los Angeles Fire Department, and the Los Angeles County Fire Department. And he waited to be called.

  Then his daughter Carrie Lyn was born in June, at a time when he was “catching up on high-school antics” that he’d missed. That meant street racing in muscle cars, beer drinking, and after getting off work from his job at Sparkletts Bottled Water Company at 11:00 P.M., heading for the bars until 2:00 A.M.

  The marriage was already shaky. He admitted to others that he was “a typical sexist prick.” He also admitted that he lacked “insight.” That had always been a problem for him, insight.

  In 1971, the Los Angeles Police Department, arguably the best and certainly the most glamorous police agency in America at the time, sent John a letter inviting him to test.

  He passed the written test, the physical agility test, the oral interview, and the medical exam. He was given a date when he’d be starting the police academy and he was ecstatic. Except that there was a second part to the medical exam—psychological testing.

  He later described the 550-question MMPI self-inventory test as “comical,” and said there were questions such as “I enjoy the ballet more than loading a truck.” Well, who wouldn’t?

  He gathered up as much maturity as he could muster and plunged into the Rorschach with gusto.

  “I actually started seeing some pretty cool images,” he reported. “Dancers, drummers around a bonfire, a ship moored in a foggy lagoon, butterflies. Then the examiner played the sex card.”

  The one where everybody sees a vagina but nobody admits it. John said he was afraid to be labeled a sex fiend so he told the guy that he saw a map of Italy instead of a woman’s snat
ch.

  He received a rejection letter some weeks later based upon the psychological evaluation. The letter said that he was “unsuitable.”

  He was shattered. Unsuitable? Then he was outraged. He followed the procedure outlined in the rejection letter, and consulted with a psychologist whose name he got from the Yellow Pages. The hired gun quickly found him “suitable,” and John made an appointment with the LAPD psychologist, armed with his second opinion.

  The doctor was a congenial fellow in the manner of his profession, but he informed the former candidate that he could not reveal specific reasons for the rejection other than that the test revealed passivity, and police officers need to be assertive.

  “Some people actually learn test taking,” the shrink told him, “as a way of passing these exams.”

  “That would be cheating,” John said, resenting the implication.

  “That’s a good spontaneous answer,” replied the psychologist.

  Then the shrink did a surprising thing. He placed John’s file on the desk, and announced that he needed a cup of coffee.

  “Be back in five minutes, son,” he said to the astonished former candidate.

  John carefully opened the file and found the name of a Sparkletts co-worker who had been interviewed by the LAPD background investigator. The worker had told the cop that John Orr was lazy and resentful of the other man’s promotion over him. He described how John had been late on two occasions, and he thought the candidate would have trouble adapting to police work.

  John was bewildered. Was that it? A jealous coworker? Or was it that he’d confessed to stealing a beer from a former employer? He’d revealed this trivial peccadillo because he feared that if they gave a polygraph it might disclose deception when they asked “Have you ever stolen from an employer?” Well, he’d eventually paid for the beer. Was that it? Finally, the evaluation stated that he needed a few years to mature and examine his life before reapplying.

  Weeks later, the heartbroken air force vet quit Sparkletts and entered the management program at Jack in the Box restaurants. But he quickly left there for a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and toward the end of 1973, despite a raise and bonuses and Jody’s protests, he gave notice again.

  About the failed psychological exam, he later said that maybe the LAPD didn’t want people to see dancers and butterflies and sleepy lagoons in those ink blots. Maybe, he said, he should have given the LAPD “spiders and snakes and lightning bolts.”

  He would’ve been a good cop, he thought, but if it wasn’t in the cards, he’d be a great firefighter. He applied and was accepted by the Los Angeles Fire Department. He was a firefighter now. Almost. He still had to get through the fire academy. But he hadn’t prepared himself physically for the academy rigors, figuring that his years as an air force firefighter should be enough for them. Two days before he was to enter the LAFD academy, John decided to play his first game of racquetball with another fire recruit. He ended up with painful foot blisters and also learned that his stamina was not so good.

  In November, on Friday the thirteenth, he was called into the captain’s office at the LAFD academy in North Hollywood and told that he hadn’t scored well on a written test, nor on two rope-and-ladder exams. John offered an excuse about sore feet, and the captain listened politely. Then he told the recruit that he could resign quietly now or wait for the next exams, which, if also yielding poor results, might result in his being fired.

  Stunned, John said he wanted to take the exams with renewed dedication.

  In the U.S. Air Force, getting onto a roof was a cinch, and almost anybody could muscle their lightweight aluminum ladders. But the LAFD academy used wooden ladders, heavy wooden ladders. How it was placed, even the angle, was critical. Lots of the other recruits had gathered to practice ladder-carries on their off-duty days. And they’d quizzed each other from the books and training manuals, but not John Orr.

  His attitude was, “I’ve been a firefighter for four years in the air force. Surely I can tie a bow knot and throw a ladder.”

  In the air force, yes, but not to the satisfaction of the L.A. Fire Department. He was released on Monday morning and went home and wept. He described it as “paralyzing.”

  The Christmas of 1973 was bleak. His marriage was nearly in ruins, and the only work he’d found was with a kindly neighbor who renovated gas pumps at service stations. And by now he had two infant daughters to support. In desperation, he applied, in January 1974, to the Glendale Fire Department, which was near the bottom of the pay scale for the fifty-five fire agencies in Los Angeles County.

  Glendale was a city of 160, 000 and encompassed 32 square miles. There were 9 fire stations and 160 firefighters, and it bordered that area of Los Angeles where he’d been raised. He knew Glendale, and he would gladly settle, if they’d take him.

  He breezed through the written exam and was called for the oral interview, very fearful of explaining his rejection by LAPD for psychological reasons, and his washing out of the LAFD academy.

  He sucked it up and boldly told the oral board that the L.A. Fire Department’s academy was “rigid,” but diplomatically added that he should have adjusted to their rigidity. He then explained that his failing marriage had been disrupting his focus and draining his energy while he’d been at the academy.

  The oral-board members seemed to appreciate that he had been a U.S. Air Force firefighter, and they actually counseled him on his marital problems. He later claimed that he was more open to these men than he ever had been with the woman he had married. He soon received a letter of congratulations upon being accepted as a recruit in Glendale’s first formal fire-academy class.

  On March 1, 1974, John Orr, number one on the hiring list, began his training, and eight weeks later, he and twelve others graduated. He was sent to Station 6 as a full-fledged fireman. Job hunting had ended. A real career had begun at last.

  It will never be known if the LAPD psychologist had left that file open to mollify the distraught applicant, and it’s uncertain if his diagnosis was even in the file at the time, but if it was, the applicant never admitted to seeing it:

  Non-acceptable applicant. Reason for rejection based upon his past history and test results. Currently having marital problems with separation. Recently walked off a job, gave no notice. Supervisors gave him poor evaluation, described him as goof-off, know-it-all, irresponsible and immature. The testing reemphasizes this. Rorschach showed him passive, indecisive, with problems with women and sex. The MMPI confirmed this and showed a schizoid person who is withdrawn from people and may have sexual confusion in his orientation. Very non-objective.

  Diagnosis: Personality trait disturbance. Emotionally unstable personality.

  After his final examination, in February 1975, John Orr was no longer a probationary rookie. He was one of them, an unconditional firefighter, and nobody could ever again say he was “unsuitable.” He grew a mustache during the decade when cops and firemen wore fiercer “stashes” than Turkish hammer throwers. Winning his spurs hadn’t happened a moment too soon. He was sick of training manuals and knot tying.

  On his off-duty days, hearth and home bored him silly, so he took a part-time job working as a clerk at a 7-Eleven Store. With the extra bucks he bought an old Ford pickup with a camper shell for his hunting and camping excursions. At the 7-Eleven, he worked with another restless employee, who was on her third unhappy marriage. And the two young people impulsively decided to get out of dreary wedlock and take an apartment in Glendale as platonic, rent-sharing housemates.

  Like his mother before him, John just got up one morning, left a note for Jody, and bugged out. The next day he drove to the Department of Public Social Services and asked how much child support he should pay for his two young daughters. And after they set up housekeeping, he reported that the platonic relationship “lasted about twenty minutes.”

  He began taking college classes in fire science on his G.I. Bill allowance, and despite his stated dislike of cops, with their mac
hismo and bullying ways—cops, he felt, never showed the proper respect for firefighters—he also took police science courses. He said it was because he wanted to “explore the conflicts” between the two emergency services, but also for the report-writing experience. Firemen wrote little, cops wrote all the time, and he had a knack for writing. And while working as a 7-Eleven clerk he found that he had a knack for something else: spotting shoplifters.

  The boredom at 7-Eleven had been getting intolerable until one day when the young firefighter started watching the kids who stopped to buy junk food on their way home from school. It was the too-cool body language. He started grabbing them in the act, making them empty pockets and backpacks. His boss was impressed. John Orr had a gift.

  Pretty soon the firefighter was spotting shoplifters everywhere. In 1976, while shopping at the Eagle Rock Plaza, he saw a guy running toward a car with an armload of men’s suits from Montgomery Ward’s. He chased the thief, tackled him, and with the help of a store security officer, held him for the cops, who came and hauled him to jail.

  That was a seminal moment, a significant piece of police work. He spoke with one of the security people, a woman whose husband was a Glendale police detective, and asked her what his chances would be of getting hired as a part-time security employee.

  She said they only hired off-duty cops, not firemen. He was disappointed, but admitted he was “hooked on this new shoplifting game.” And that same day, while shopping at the Sears store, he spotted a geezer boosting a few hand tools. He went to the cashier and asked her to call security, and they nailed the guy, who had lots more merchandise in his pockets.

  Once again, John asked about part-time work as a security employee and was once again told that the night shift was full of off-duty Glendale cops.