Fire Lover Page 9

  John hadn’t opened his mouth during the interview. In fact, he’d spent the interview time in her bathroom, standing in the spot where the woman had stood when she looked out the window and saw a man hunched over in the brush right where the College Hills fire had ostensibly originated. It was at the mouth of a ravine, where the wind would take that fire up, creating a chimney effect.

  At 11:00 P.M. Gomez thought they were finally going to do something when John drove him to a residential street and said they should surveil for a while, and wait for a suspect who he thought might be worth checking. So they sat. And they sat. When Gomez asked questions about the suspect’s car, John was vague and distracted and said he’d know it if he saw it again. After wasting another thirty minutes, they left.

  John thanked Moses Gomez and said he would call. The next day he did not call, so Gomez called him. But John told Gomez he had “everything under control” and that he’d send the fire marshal a copy of his report. But he never did. Gomez was the second person to say that the behavior of the Glendale arson investigator seemed very peculiar.

  That evening in Fresno, at the California Conference of Arson Investigators, John Orr’s partner, Don Yeager, and the other conferees had finished their training classes and had arrived at their hotel just in time for a wet-T-shirt contest that was about to begin.

  But a Pasadena arson investigator walked up to Yeager and said, “Hey, do you know what’s going on down in your city?”

  Don Yeager turned on the TV and called Glendale Dispatch for an update. He decided there was no point leaving at that moment, but first thing in the morning he checked out of the conference and hit the highway south. By then he knew that this wasn’t just a major fire; this was the largest fire in the city’s history.

  Twenty minutes after he arrived at the command post, John showed up and said, “What’re you doing here?”

  “I thought you’d need help,” Yeager said.

  But John said, “No, I have it under control.”

  Under control? What did that mean? Yeager asked, “Have you had time to do any canvassing?”

  John answered, “I’ve turned that over to the police department.”

  Yeager had been his partner for almost three years and he’d known John since he’d joined the fire service, but he couldn’t figure this out. Canvassing should be kept in-house, done by the arson unit, not turned over to the cops.

  Yeager took it upon himself to do a little canvassing on his own, but he didn’t find anybody who claimed to have already been canvassed by cops. The police weren’t doing any canvassing for witnesses!

  The next day John told Yeager that he’d found a possible delay device consisting of a modified butane lighter, and he talked in a general way about a possible area of origin at a hillside where lots of trash had been littered around.

  There was a giant pin board in the office of the arson unit that Don Yeager called a war board, and he began pinning things to the board, and working on leads, and witnesses, and useless tips that were flooding in. But he seemed to be working alone. He didn’t feel that his partner was doing much of anything in regard to that calamitous fire other than writing a lengthy report on fire damage, listing reasons that the fire had spread so rapidly. But there was no cause-and-origin report, nothing specific about an arson investigation. He felt he was constantly having to push the fire captain into any investigative work on the College Hills fire.

  John kept explaining that his damage report was keeping him tied up, but finally Yeager had had enough. He said, “I’m going up to Chief Gray and I’m going to demand to have my partner back, because you’re having to spend all your time doing things other than investigating the College Hills fire, and it’s frustrating.”

  John said he agreed completely, and as far as Yeager complaining to the boss, John said, “I wish you would.”

  Yeager went to see the fire marshal, Chief Gray, and made some heated demands about his partner being so overburdened with niggling details that they had no time to properly investigate the most disastrous fire the city had ever experienced.

  Gray finally had to chill him out by saying, “Hey, wait a minute. You’re getting kinda borderline here! If you’ve got a problem with John Orr you’re gonna have to address it with John Orr.”

  But Yeager tried to explain that John Orr wasn’t the problem. They were not able to work on the College Hills fire because of being loaded down with all the other jobs that Chief Gray was giving to John.

  The puzzled fire marshal said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Then he informed Yeager that John had been assigned to work only on the College Hills fire, and didn’t have to work on anything else. And that he had carte blanche on overtime or anything he needed!

  And Yeager had to slink back to his partner in confusion. After he told John what Chief Gray had said, his partner swore and disputed what Gray had told Yeager, and Yeager ended up befuddled by all of it. He didn’t know what to believe.

  There never was a cause-and-origin report written on the College Hills fire. There was never a “D.R. number” requested from the police department to delineate a crime investigation that commanding officers could monitor. It was all treated rather informally, this terrible event. There was the fire-incident report, John Orr’s lengthy summary of damage, and general opinions on how and why the fire had spread so disastrously. It was almost as though the fire had just happened—an act of God, perhaps.

  Captain Orr had a whole lot of autonomy. There was little or no arson-unit oversight from his superiors. As far as arson investigation and proper reporting was concerned, the College Hills catastrophe just seemed to slip through the cracks.

  The news media wallowed in disaster coverage for a few weeks, interviewing homeless property owners from College Hills who had lost pets, heirlooms, treasured memorabilia, photos of loved ones both living and dead. When it was all over, Glendale, California, had suffered its worst disaster. Sixty-six homes were damaged or destroyed, but miraculously, nobody had been killed or seriously injured, and that muted some of the criticism of the fire department that follows in such cases.

  For the Glendale Fire Department, one good thing had come out of it. The budget cuts they’d been facing were called off. The argument could be made that the fire department needed an even bigger budget. The fire setter, if there was one, had made their argument for them.

  Heat from the College Hills fire ended up cooking the goose of arson investigator Don Yeager. After he’d gotten vocal with Chief Gray about the arson unit being overloaded with trivial duties, John Orr pointed out to Gray that he could now see for himself how hotheaded Yeager was. John said that Yeager irritated everybody with his abrasive personality, and he worried that his armed partner might someday snap and “go postal.” He suggested to Gray that it was time for Yeager to be transferred back to the firehouse, but Gray said, “Let’s keep him until December. Then he’ll have his three years on the arson unit and we can call it a normal rotation.”

  John later wrote: “I had no choice but to accept the chief’s decision. I would have to endure Don for another five months.”

  By August, the College Hills telephone tips had petered out and the Glendale arson unit began getting back to normal, but in the first week of September John again went to the fire marshal, and the topic of their meeting was once again Don Yeager.

  John reported to their boss that Yeager had angered the detectives with whom the arson unit had been working on a minor case, and that the Glendale Police Department now refused to work with Yeager on any future cases, so they must take extreme measures. Yeager had to leave now.

  Chief Gray finally concurred, and Yeager was called into the chief’s office and informed that “department needs” necessitated his immediate return to the firehouse. He got an attaboy and a pat on the back, and the selection process for a new arson investigator was begun. So ended John Orr’s third professional partnership.

  In October, the Arson/Explosives U
nit of the Glendale Fire Department received a transfer from the ranks. Joe Lopez, a ten-year firefighter, was assigned to Captain Orr as his junior partner. Lopez was a fitness buff who worked out at the YMCA several times a week, and John said of him, “If I end up in any foot pursuits I can just let Joe off his leash.” The canine analogy must have seemed apt because he also said that his new partner had “the pliability and devotion of a six-month-old puppy.”

  In November, Glendale conducted its fourth annual Fire Investigation 2B Class. It lasted a week and involved thirty students and sixty staffers. John Orr, at this stage of his career, was one of only six arson investigators in the entire state of California who had the honor of administering the session for certification as level I or II California arson investigators. There would be a five-day final examination for students, all of whom had also completed three one-week pretesting sessions.

  It went well, but John never conducted one of these without recalling that a few years earlier, a police chief from Northern California who had sent one of his cops to the training course wrote a glowing tribute about Captain Orr, but in his letter mistakenly referred to him as Detective Orr.

  That accolade resulted in John being ordered into the office of a police department captain who presented the attaboy along with an admonition not to represent himself as a detective or any kind of cop, because he was a fire department employee. The police captain sent a memo to the fire chief saying that Captain Orr should be counseled about implying that he was a real police officer. John Orr would never forget it.

  It was in such a training session that John had instructed and accredited the arson investigator from Bakersfield, Marvin G. Casey.

  In December 1990 it was hard to imagine how John Orr’s life could get any better. He thought that both his fourth wife and fourth investigative partner were keepers. Wanda had a good job at Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank, and John believed he had the best job in his city. He wore civilian clothes, never had a roll call to attend, worked four days a week, and had a take-home car and as much overtime pay as he cared to earn whenever he needed more than his annual pay of sixty-five thousand dollars. And after taking a writing class, his novel was progressing nicely.

  He said that he was proud to have earned “the respect of my peers in the fire service.” But that would never be enough, not for John Orr. He also reported: “Even more valuable to me was a degree of respect shown to me by most Glendale police officers and detectives, as well as from many of those at outside agencies.”

  There it was, and it would never go away. He couldn’t get past it. More valuable than anything in his life was what he seldom got: respect from them—the real cops who had long ago rejected him.

  Beginning in December 1990 and continuing through March 1991, the Los Angeles area was blitzed by an arson series of a kind never seen before. Nineteen arsons or arson attempts were made in retail stores from one end of the Los Angeles basin to the other. These brazen and frightening attacks would eventually focus the attention of many arson sleuths in the L.A. area.

  The first occurred on December 10 at People’s Department Store on Figueroa Street in Los Angeles, not far from the Eagle Rock residence of Captain John Orr. The Glendale arson investigator’s partner, Joe Lopez, was having lunch with his wife that afternoon, and John reported that it was his day to go home and check on one of the “children,” a setter/Labrador mix named Cody, who had belonged to his wife Wanda before their marriage. The old dog was dying, and John said he needed to visit him at midday to take him outside or clean up after him if Cody hadn’t been able to control his bowels or bladder.

  Just after 1:00 P.M. that afternoon, People’s Department Store, catering to a clientele interested in bargains, was busy with shoppers, mostly Hispanic women, many with small children. In the fabric department, at the northwest end of the store, mothers shopped while kids wandered through the toy department. Along the west wall was a curtain display, and one of the shoppers, who had been searching in vain for her children, suddenly saw flames rising four feet from the floor. The curtains were on fire. Another shopper spotted those flames just a moment later, when fire from the burning curtains was already lapping at the ceiling. And her children were also missing.

  Employees Ana Ramirez and Maria Chavez began rounding up children and adults and rushing them toward the exits. There were no injuries and the children were all safe, but the entire building was ablaze. The roof collapsed and fed the fire even more.

  Captain Orr later reported that he’d spotted a “header,” a column of dark smoke, about three miles south, drifting over Highland Park when he was arriving home to care for Cody.

  He said that after dealing with the dog he noticed that the header was bigger and knew that it must be from a major structure fire. He carried an eight-millimeter video camera in case of just such events, so he jumped in his car, flicked on his red light, and raced toward the header.

  He reported that when he arrived, the building was engulfed and firefighters were busy suppressing, so he shot some video of the spectacular event.

  On Thursday of that week, John had some private business that required him to leave his partner behind. He said that he needed to pick up the daughter of a friend at a La Cañada day-care center, and then drive the child home to Burbank, where her mother lived and worked. The “friend” was a petite brunette named Chris, and it appeared that Ozzie and Harriet might once again be needing lawyers.

  Two miles from Chris’s apartment was Mort’s Surplus, a sporting-goods outlet on Victory Boulevard where John sometimes shopped. At 3:41 P.M. a fire broke out in a stack of cardboard boxes, quickly sweeping up and spreading along the Celotex ceiling until the entire structure was threatened. The first engine from the Burbank Fire Department reported that the building was charged with very hot smoke. Within minutes, more engine companies arrived and the super-hot smoke billowed out of the building and enveloped it.

  John reported that it was after dropping off the child that he heard the crackle of activity on his radio frequencies. Then, he said, he saw brownish smoke rising in the sky and he thought it would be something to videotape for his training films, so he sped to the fire scene. During the fire suppression, he stood across the street from the building videotaping the efforts of the firefighters, wondering, he said, if the high-voltage lines overhead would melt and drop onto the sidewalk.

  John was surprised when his partner, Joe Lopez, who knew he was in Burbank on private business, showed up at the three-alarm blaze and found him videotaping. John said of Lopez, “He was taking this joined-at-the-hip stuff rather seriously.” The senior arson investigator had never been anybody’s Siamese twin. This Siegfried-and-Roy stuff had to stop.

  Captain Steve Patterson, an arson investigator from the Burbank Fire Department, arrived at Mort’s Surplus while the fire was still burning, when the roof was sagging and it was unsafe to enter. Captain Patterson could not find any remnant of a delay device, but wrote in his report that he believed one could have been used because no one was seen in the area of origin just prior to the fire.

  The next afternoon at 1:00 P.M., on Laurel Canyon Boulevard in North Hollywood, Constance Schipper, manager of the paint and plumbing department of Builder’s Emporium, was stunned to see fire billowing up from a shopping cart filled with throw pillows. She ran to the cart and began pulling out the flaming pillows; the fire was extinguished by other employees. There on the floor among the pillows were a cigarette butt, two matches, and a rubber band.

  Hollywood was next. On Monday, December 17, at 1:43 P.M., J. J. Newberry’s, on Hollywood Boulevard, sustained moderate fire damage and heavy smoke damage after a fire broke out in display racks packed with blankets and comforters. Arson investigators listed the fire as being “suspicious in nature.”

  On the biggest shopping day of the year, December 26, Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley was struck by an incendiary blitzkrieg so brazen that retail establishments soon started hiring security guard
s for fire watch.

  The first was at 11:43 A.M. on Ventura Boulevard, at a dry-goods outlet, Bed Bath & Beyond, in a rack of plastic-wrapped throw pillows. The overhead sprinklers were triggered and the fire was contained very quickly. But just four blocks away at Pier 1 Imports, also on Ventura Boulevard, and at Strouds Linen Warehouse, fires broke out almost simultaneously at 12:07 P.M.

  The fire at Pier 1 Imports came shooting out from under the mezzanine, and the ten customers in the store started yelling and running for the exits. The fire burned through the roof and ventilated itself. At Strouds Linen Warehouse, the cashier working at the rear of the store spotted smoke and flames bursting from a display of comforters. The heat got so violent that the metal beams holding up the roof became distorted and pulled away from the wall, causing the roof to cave in, which fed more fuel to the blaze.

  A team of arson investigators from the L.A. Fire Department interviewed thirteen people before hearing of a suspect of any kind, but then they encountered a pair of security officers from the Thrifty Drug Store a few doors away from Strouds. The guards described a medium-size white male, thirty-five to thirty-nine years old, with slick black hair, wearing a purple shirt, black pants, and a black jacket. He was said to have had “soot” on him when spotted just prior to the fire at Strouds.

  The description of the sooty suspect was broadcast on the LAPD frequency to all units in the vicinity. The arson team then interviewed the owner of a nearby newsstand, and again the description of the man in black popped up. This time he was described as a “fast-walking mumbler.”

  Later that day they contacted still another employee of Thrifty Drug Store, who said that just before the fire, the same man in black had walked into Thrifty’s and made an announcement to one and all. He’d shouted, “There’s a guy out there that was looking in Strouds’ window! The guy was so ugly that he caught the window on fire!”