Fire Lover Page 6

  John Orr bagged his first pyromaniac when a landlord reported a series of small fires in an apartment complex. On the last one a “bystander” shouted a warning to residents and escorted some of them out before the engine company arrived. He was the same guy who had recently spotted a purse snatching and captured the thief after a foot pursuit.

  John immediately suspected the bystander hero. He wrote, “This guy sounded like me. He even looked like me right down to the mustache.”

  Then the hero was a bystander once too often and tried fighting a fire with a garden hose, but got overcome by smoke and ended up in an ER with an IV in his arm. He had to give the address of his employer for the hospital records, and he did, but the address belonged to the Glendale Police Department, a clue to the hospital staff that the guy just might be a head case.

  John went to see the fellow and got incriminating admissions, filing not only arson charges against him but also bigamy, after the firebug’s estranged wife admitted that he hadn’t bothered to divorce his first wife when they got married.

  He thought that pyros were interesting. He learned that they made up less than 5 percent of arson suspects and that typically they were loners.

  John wrote: “The fire becomes a friend they can relate to. Their fires bring attention, friends, admiration as heroes, and self-esteem. Like a drug addict, one good score leads to the desire for another.”

  In the August 1982 issue of American Fire Journal, a Glendale battalion chief wrote about his new Arson/Explosives Unit.

  During the first thirteen months, 153 incidents were investigated by the unit: 78 cases were cleared, 25 arrests were made, 23 cases were filed, resulting in 11 convictions. In addition, 29 cases were referred for inter-agency counseling. Cases cleared by the unit were approximately 21 percent above the national average. Additionally, incidents involving arson dropped to 31 percent within the first year. When news media carried the stories it had an immediate effect on those who may have had arson in mind.

  So it seemed to everyone that the “marriage” of cop and firefighter was working. But, as with the other unions in John Orr’s life, this one was shaky. He suffered a truly humiliating experience.

  “Dennis treated me like a training officer,” he reported. “With his rookie on a leash, he belittled me publicly because one night I wore a gun while processing a fire scene. A reporter showed up and asked Dennis how the unit was working out, and he responded, ‘John still has to work out his wanna-be image. He’s in there now digging around a fire scene wearing a gun. What’s he need a pistol for? It’s a fire scene and we’re the only ones around.’”

  The quote appeared in the Glendale News-Press the very next day, and of course, the horse laughs could be heard in every firehouse in town. John Orr said that his partnership with Dennis Wilson henceforth looked like “a marriage of convenience.”

  And the other one wasn’t doing too hot either. He and his wife of one year could have a three-hour debate about how long to cook a meat loaf.

  Of course, there was nothing that infuriated a real cop more than to have a fireman solve his cases for him. And John Orr did solve a few, including one involving a stolen and torched Mercedes convertible that was used by a pair of residential burglars to haul away loot, including guns and jewelry.

  It was a no-suspects case, but he and his partner started to canvass the neighborhood, several blocks in every direction from the Mercedes dump site, and they came up with a few rumors about some neighborhood bad guys. Then they put on Public Service Department shirts, knocked on doors, and made cold calls on the phone, posing as employees of the Water and Power Department.

  Finally they ended up at the house of a local thug who’d been in a lot of trouble in his life, and when John Orr learned that the dude happened to be out of town, he went undercover for the first time, playing the part of an old jailhouse cellmate. He wangled a recent snapshot of the guy, and learned that he’d been at a recent party given by the burglary victim.

  One burglar got state prison time and the other was put on probation, and, any way you cut it, some good police work was done by the wannabe and his partner.

  He sent his writing to American Fire Journal. After he submitted a piece about training burns of abandoned houses, the editor asked for more. So he wrote another examining the mind and methods of a serial fire setter. John Orr’s reputation in the local fire-fighting community was becoming significant.

  And his personal life seemed to be taking a turn for the better in 1983, despite what he saw as his third wife’s argumentative style. He reported, “I typically stayed home evenings helping her daughters with homework, preparing brown bag lunches for the next day, along with Ozzie-and-Harriet-like family amusements.”

  Except that later in the year, Ozzie hauled ass yet another time. They eventually were divorced, but remained friends.

  He reported that during this period in his career he and his partner found a lot of incendiary devices, some of them involving a cigarette, a few matches, and a rubber band, which, in the case of brush fires, would be weighed down with a screw and tossed from a moving car.

  But while the arson duo still made plenty of arrests, “like a typical married couple” we grew apart, he said. Typical for John Orr, that is, who by then had dumped three wives, while for Dennis Wilson, family took priority over his job.

  Another blow to the partnering came when Wilson designed new business cards with two overlapping badges as a logo, fire and police, and there was no surprise which one was on top. John seethed.

  As he recalled the inevitable rupture with his partner and all the slights that had preceded it, he made a claim that contradicted everything in his life since his rejection by the LAPD in 1971 for being “unsuitable.” It was later said that his self-appraisal was breathtaking in its self-deception. He wrote:

  Dennis never quite got it. I didn’t want to be a cop, and even resented it when citizens and crooks said, “You’re a cop, aren’t you?” I was a fireman. The good guy. All I wanted from Dennis was a little credit once in a while. I just wanted acceptance.

  Perhaps the unvarnished truth, and the very last word, so to speak, on John Orr’s obsession with, and paranoia about, real cops can be gleaned from his relationship with one he’d dated periodically.

  Many years after they’d broken up she had occasion to talk about the cop fixation that had gripped him. She implied that she’d been a kind of enabler, because after he’d begged, and cajoled, pleaded, and badgered her, she at last agreed to indulge him, and they met furtively in the basement of the fire station, where in full uniform—Sam Browne, gun, handcuffs, the works—she proved at last that he was more than suitable. John Orr got a real cop to give new meaning to “civil service,” and risk her job and his, by getting down and whacking his weasel right there in the basement of the firehouse.

  After the breakup of his third marriage, John moved in with a private investigator friend and part-time employer, Bill McLaughlin. Working for McLaughlin as a fire investigator helped his finances, what with a couple of kids and three ex-wives out there, but truth be told, he could never get enough of sleuthing, public or private. McLaughlin and his wife rented him a room in their hilltop home in Chevy Chase Canyon, in brush-fire country.

  Some good things were happening to him. His article “Problems of the Firefighter Turned Arson Investigator” was published. It only paid $106, but now he could rightly call himself a professional writer.

  Sometimes his sleuthing became a bit peculiar. He liked to have a drink after work with Bill McLaughlin to discuss his cases and to learn about PI methods, such as how to use electronic eavesdropping equipment. He thought that his fellow firefighters might be interested, so the next time a few of them got together for a brew, he brought up a scheme to install a bug in the office of the labor-negotiating team to see what they were going to offer the firefighters during contract talks. Saner voices prevailed and his offer was declined, since nobody wanted to get caught up in a firehou
se version of Watergate. Still, he was undaunted and inordinately curious. He surreptitiously installed an electronic bug in the secretary’s break room.

  He said, “It worked just fine.” No telling what juicy tidbits he picked up, even though if he’d been caught, his job would’ve been terminated on the spot, or he might have been jailed. It didn’t seem to strike him as risky or outlandish.

  John Orr had a take-home car, all the overtime pay he’d care to earn, and the best job in the city, but he felt it was time to study for promotion to fire captain. After all, he had the experience.

  It appeared that the city of Glendale was having far more than its share of incendiary fires, but John said it may have been that it only seemed that way because he worked harder at defining them. He was building a reputation among arson investigators in neighboring jurisdictions, and it got enhanced when he received permission from the California Conference of Arson Investigators to host their five-day fire-fighting examinations.

  He choreographed a live burn of a derelict building, a big one involving forty helpers, role players, and coordinators. Everyone thought it was spectacular. They got to watch a building fire from inception through all stages, and it was easy to see how people described fires in anthropomorphic terms. It did lick and dance and leap, after which it growled and roared and devoured everything, including the air that fed it.

  A Love Machine was loosed upon the San Gabriel Valley. John Orr chronicled some of his adventures:

  During my single years in the early-mid 1980s, I simultaneously dated Glendale and Pasadena lady friends. My love life was no secret. I couldn’t leave my pager on all night without a charger if I slept somewhere other than my home base. I had to let Verdugo Dispatch know my overnight phone number. If I called after 10:00 P.M., the dispatcher, no matter who answered, would say, “Hi, John. Who is it tonight? Miss 242 or Miss 795?” For the Glendale or Pasadena prefixes.

  Women weren’t drinking so much anymore. A lot of them were doing the twelve-step tango and the carefree bachelor decided that the ones he was meeting in gin joints weren’t cutting it. He began answering singles ads but didn’t share this secret with anyone. During that year he answered eleven ads and dated ten women. Most of them were worth a second date or even a third, a pretty good average.

  His first date, though, might’ve discouraged some singles. After answering her ad, he agreed to meet the woman at a Chinese restaurant for lunch, but just as he was in the middle of a formal introduction, he got paged to an accidental fire where a homeowner, who’d been cleaning the gas range with a flammable liquid, ignited gas fumes that burned her to death.

  He explained his predicament, that he’d have to hurry to the fire scene to meet the coroner’s people, and she said, “Cool! Can I go with you? I’ve never seen a burned body!”

  The women he dated from the singles ads were of a higher caliber than those he met in the bars, he said.

  And then in the autumn of 1984, on October 10, he attended the most monumental fire of his career, the disastrous blaze in South Pasadena at Ole’s Home Center. The morning after that fire, when they were sifting through the rubble for clues, the South Pasadena fire chief, who’d heard about the photos John Orr had snapped the night before, asked to see them. So John put down his shovel, headed for a one-hour photo mart, and returned just before noon.

  He couldn’t believe what was happening then, what with the L.A. County sheriffs clearing out debris on a D-9 Caterpillar tractor instead of crawling the scene on hands and knees. Even the cadaver dogs they’d brought in couldn’t find a scent in all that mess.

  John quit the scene in disgust. “I decided I had better things to do than lean on a shovel until some cop snapped his fingers,” he reported. “The condescending cop attitude toward fire department investigators was never more pronounced than at that scene.”

  By 5:00 P.M., Sergeant Palmer of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department attended a press conference and the fire was declared accidental.

  John later contacted the coroner’s office and was stunned to learn that no law-enforcement officer was even present during the autopsies. He talked with a pathologist and learned that the bodies had very high concentrations of carbon monoxide. He later wrote, “They were dead before the fire trucks ever left the station. I considered quietly pursuing the case, but my partner warned me off.”

  In 1985, they celebrated the fifth anniversary of the arson unit, but John knew that yet another “marriage” was doomed. The following year his partnership with Dennis Wilson ended for good when John confidentially told the boss that things weren’t going so well with him and his partner, and that for “the good of the unit Wilson had to go.” This time John didn’t have to run from a relationship. His partner was sent back to the police department with a face-saving attaboy from all concerned.

  He’d gotten rid of one partner, but took on another, continuing to commit serial marriage. Wanda owned her own home, drove a nice low-mileage car, had no kids and no man in her life, only a dog and two cats for company. In November, in a civil ceremony in her home presided over by a Glendale judge, who, ironically, was a retired LAPD cop, Wanda became wife number four.

  There was a thing about “arsonists-in-training,” as he called them. In the beginning, when they were setting small fires, it was usually done to build self-esteem. He saw it in a young woman, a former “police explorer” who had worked at the police station preparing for a career in law enforcement. There occurred a series of small grass fires near her father’s posh home, and she’d called to report all of them, even fighting one fire with a garden hose.

  John decided to interview that young woman after he learned from a friend at the Glendale Police Department that she had been terminated from the police explorer program because she was suspected of theft, specifically the theft of a police badge.

  He went to the police to confer about the fires and the suspected badge theft, but, as usual, “they smirked” and didn’t seem to give a shit. So he went to her home alone and spoke with the young woman about the fires she’d reported, and about her termination from the police department explorer program, and about her depression now that the police department had found her unsuitable.

  It didn’t take long at all for the lonely girl to confess through flowing tears that she was bored and terribly lonely, and that she had trouble getting along with others, and that she was never truly appreciated by authority figures, especially her usually absent father.

  She denied stealing the police badge, but he figured it was stashed somewhere. He told her gently that he would have to book her for arson, but that he’d allow her to surrender herself to avoid the humiliation of having to face all those asshole cops she’d known from her police explorer stint.

  As he put it, “Firefighters care for people. There aren’t many cops who would even consider the feelings of someone they’d arrested.”

  Someone like the lonely young woman, for instance, who felt abandoned by the frequently absent father with whom she shared the home, a young woman who was easily bored, rebellious, resentful of authority, and so in need of attention and approval that she’d set fires in order to report them. And so desperate for power and control that she might run the risk of stealing a badge from the police station where she worked—a world-class cop wanna-be. But instead of seeing herself as an “eccentric,” the young woman called herself a “nonconformist.”

  John Orr later reported that he’d tried to give her a break by okaying a release on her own recognizance, and recommending a probationary disposition of her case, explaining about her daddy issues and low self-esteem. He never said whether or not she’d reminded him of anyone.

  The police department employee who had put him on to that case, informing him of the badge theft that aroused his suspicion about fire setting, was Karen Krause, the sister-in-law of Carolyn Krause, who had perished in the Ole’s Home Center holocaust.

  4

  INTUITION

  The California
Conference of Arson Investigators hosted a three-day seminar in Fresno starting on January 13, 1987. John Orr decided to go and delegated his new junior partner to remain in Glendale and mind the store.

  It can seem a very long drive to Central California from Los Angeles, north through the San Joaquin Valley, past endless truck crops and grazing land. There are mountains, the Sierra Madres to the west, the Tehachapis to the east, and then one passes through Bakersfield, once a destination for the Okie migration of the Great Depression, still a vital agricultural zone where folks can tune their radios to real country stars such as George Strait and even the old Bakersfield homeboy Buck Owens, rather than crossover cowboys.

  After Bakersfield, there’s not much until you arrive in the town of Tulare, and if you weren’t already aware of it, you’ll have an idea how crucial the farms and ranches of California are, not only to the state but to the country. Then, somewhere around the fourth hour of driving, you’ll arrive in the city of Fresno, site of the arson seminar, but if you drive like John Orr, you’ll get there much faster. He could drive with even more gusto now that he was wearing glasses full-time to correct the nearsightedness that had started to affect his shooting scores.

  There were 242 conferees—arson investigators, prosecutors, insurance investigators, cops, and firefighters—arriving that Tuesday from all over the state. The weather was foggy, cold, and miserable that year, and most of the seminar participants stayed in and around the hotel, networking and boozing it up in the restaurant and bar. Of course, some of the more restless ventured out looking for action, such as there was. Fresno was a growing city of 350, 000, but it had managed to retain much of its rural ethic. The conferees from the big cities said there was nothing to do there except watch grapes turn into Fresno raisins.

  That conference might have come and gone and passed from memory except for the stunning events that took place starting on the first evening, when the city was swarming with men and women whose lives were dedicated to fire prevention and suppression.